… Strategic decisions can make all the difference in a close race. Clinton lost the White House (despite winning the popular vote) to Republican Donald Trump on the strength of about 100,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. That is the definition of a close race. But a review of […] Read more »
The polls didn’t fail. We just chose to ignore the math
There’s a lot of talk right now that polling failed. But Trump’s win was hardly an unpredictable “black swan” event. All the evidence was there, if you knew how to read it. In fact, the polls did ok, 2016 was not even a particularly large miss by historical standards. … […] Read more »
There may have been shy Trump supporters after all
… Could Trump’s social undesirability have mattered for pre-election polls? The challenge here is that people refuse to answer survey questions in a variety of ways. Hiding your views need not mean lying. It could mean saying that you’re undecided or simply not taking the poll at all. CONT. Elizabeth […] Read more »
Why Women Did Not Unite to Vote Against Donald Trump
Women were predicted to come out in force to vote for the first female president and against a man who demeaned them and bragged about sexual assault. Instead, they voted more or less as they always have: along party lines. The share of women who voted for Donald J. Trump […] Read more »
Why identity politics couldn’t clinch a Clinton win
Many Democrats have believed that a coalition of minorities, millennials and single women would help create a new Democratic majority for years to come. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was counting on it. But the “rising American electorate,” as it’s called, failed to carry Clinton across the finish line. It didn’t […] Read more »
The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse
One way to think of the job journalism does is telling a community about itself, and on those terms the American media failed spectacularly this election cycle. That Donald Trump’s victory came as such a surprise — a systemic shock, really — to both journalists and so many who read […] Read more »