Conventional Wisdom May Be Contaminating Polls

Sunday’s French presidential election was the latest in a trend. The centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron, won by a considerably wider margin than most observers predicted, with a 32-percentage-point landslide over Marine Le Pen, larger than the 24-point margin that the final polls showed.

But the trend isn’t that center-left globalism is making a comeback — that’s too early to say. Instead, it’s this: When the conventional wisdom tries to outguess the polls, it almost always guesses in the wrong direction. CONT.

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight

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