The 2016 presidential election was a jarring event for polling in the United States. Pre-election polls fueled high-profile predictions that Hillary Clinton’s likelihood of winning the presidency was about 90 percent, with estimates ranging from 71 to over 99 percent. When Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidency in the early hours of November 9th, it came as a shock even to his own pollsters (Jacobs and House 2016). There was (and continues to be) widespread consensus that the polls failed.
But did the polls fail? And if so why? Those are the central questions addressed in this report, which was commissioned by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). CONT.
American Association for Public Opinion Research