Three facts about polling in the 2016 election are well established by now: The national polls were quite accurate in their estimates of the popular vote. The state polls were spottier. And the media narrative, drawn from electoral college projections vote based on those state polls, was a hot mess.
Specialists have done plenty of postmortems. That includes an extensive evaluation by a task force of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and a New York Times Upshot summary of various investigations. Many, naturally, have called for more and better state polls.
But we propose a promising alternative: Use a large, high-quality, national pre-election survey to make state-level predictions. Our technique proves highly accurate in predicting the 2016 election, and previous presidential elections back to 2000. CONT.
Gary Langer & Chad Kiewiet de Jonge, Monkey Cage