… In a perfect world, polls sample from the population of voters, who would state their political preference perfectly clearly and then vote accordingly. However, results from small random samples can be quite unreliable due to extremely narrow electoral margins. To calculate the probability of winning the 2016 US presidential election in that perfect world, we drew 1 million random samples (with a reasonable sample size of 1,500) from each of the four key state’s observed votes for Clinton, Trump, and other candidates. Next, we counted the number of random samples with the most votes for Trump and the number of samples with Clinton as the winner. CONT.
Manfred te Grotenhuis, Subu Subramanian, Rense Nieuwenhuis, Ben Pelzer & Rob Eisinga, LSE USAPP