America’s political geography follows the contours of its physical geography. The coasts are home to urban Democratic havens, while Republicans count on the vast and less densely populated areas that almost always support the ticket. The suburbs that sit in between can swing elections, as they did for Obama in […] Read more »
The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.
The polls missed Donald Trump’s election. Individual polls missed, at the state level and nationally (though national polls weren’t far off). So did aggregated polls. So did poll-based forecasts such as ours. And so did exit polls. … Pollsters will need weeks or months to sort through what happened, and […] Read more »
Results call future of political polling into question
For pollsters, the 2016 presidential election will go down as more than an embarrassment — it threatens to spiral into an existential crisis. At the moment we needed them most, when the nation was desperate for accurate projections, many pollsters whiffed. Although most correctly predicted Hillary Clinton’s narrow popular-vote victory, […] Read more »
Behind Trump’s victory: Divisions by race, gender, education
Donald Trump scored an impressive Electoral College victory Nov. 8 after a campaign that revealed deep divisions – by race, gender and education – that were as wide and in some cases wider than in previous elections, according to an analysis of national exit poll data. CONT. Alec Tyson & […] Read more »
Five key lessons from Donald Trump’s surprising victory
Lesson 1: Early political science forecasts were, on average, correct. In January 2014, I wrote a piece called “The Democrats’ uphill battle to 270 electoral votes.” That piece was predicated on conditions in the country at the time: economic growth, the president’s approval rating and the greater tendency of the […] Read more »
How polls missed the presidential election so badly
Heading into Election Day, virtually all public polling — at the national and swing-state level — pointed to a relatively easy victory for Democrat Hillary Clinton. That, um, didn’t happen. In search of the “why” behind that poll fail, I contacted my longtime friend Jon Cohen. Jon was once the […] Read more »