… The 2016 election, which rewarded the media’s love of hyperbole, made fools of almost every prognosticator. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which had given Hillary Clinton a 71.4 percent chance of victory, came out better than most; Sam Wang, director of the Princeton Election Consortium, blew it so badly that he […] Read more »
The 2016 national polls are looking less wrong after final election tallies
UPDATE: This post from shortly after the November election has been updated to reflect accuracy of polls after states certified their vote counts. National polls were more accurate than they appeared immediately after the election, as Hillary Clinton’s two percentage-point advantage in the popular vote was similar to her three-point […] Read more »
Belief in conspiracies largely depends on political identity
Sometimes it seems that Americans will believe anything. And what we know as true or not true these days can depend on our political point of view. But there are many of us who are willing to give at least some credence to the possibility that a claim might be […] Read more »
It’s Not About the Economy
… Elkhart is a case study in how Democrats lost the 2016 elections despite the economic resurgence the country experienced under Obama. It shows how, in an increasingly polarized country, an improving economy is not enough to get Republicans to vote for Democrats, in part because they don’t give Democrats […] Read more »
How Analytical Models Failed Clinton
… The reliance, or perhaps over-reliance on analytics, may be one of the factors contributing to Clinton’s surprise defeat. The Clinton team was so confident in its analytical models that it opted not to conduct tracking polls in a number of states during the last month of campaign. As a […] Read more »
Sorry, Liberals. Bigotry Didn’t Elect Donald Trump.
Donald J. Trump won the white working-class vote over Hillary Clinton by a larger margin than any major-party nominee since World War II. Instead of this considerable achievement inspiring introspection, figures from the heights of journalism, entertainment, literature and the Clinton campaign continue to suggest that Mr. Trump won the […] Read more »