Background: Hillary Clinton was given a 65% or 80% or 90% chance of winning the electoral college. She lost. Naive view: The poll-based models and the prediction markets said Clinton would win, and she lost. The models are wrong! CONT. Andrew Gelman, Columbia U. Read more »
The hard question isn’t why Clinton lost — it’s why Trump won
… One question I’ve heard people ask since Clinton’s loss is how it can be about race if she lost states Obama won, and if Obama won more white voters than she did. This is not the puzzle many are making it out to be. There’s a long and deep […] Read more »
What the Polls Were Never Going to Reveal
… While many Americans are surprised by the result, the people who populate the punditry class are truly shocked by it. I’m one of them. Many of us relied on a set of polls that were structurally off by two or three points in favor of Clinton, and exit polls […] Read more »
Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else
Based on what most of us would have thought possible a year or two ago, the election of Donald Trump was one of the most shocking events in American political history. But it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise based on the polls — at least if you […] Read more »
Yes, working class whites really did make Trump win. No, it wasn’t simply economic anxiety.
We knew all along that Donald Trump drew his strength from the white working class. We knew this from the patterns in the primaries. We knew this from the nonstop polling conducted over the past 18 months. We knew this from all of the campaign-trail dispatches showing his anti-trade, anti-elite […] Read more »
David Plouffe: What I Got Wrong About the Election
Like many people around the world, I expected a comfortable Hillary Clinton victory on Tuesday. … My confidence was not partisan spin. It was based on public data, voting history and some sense of the Clinton campaign’s own models. I played with various state scenarios, and even in the most […] Read more »