A revolution against politics as they are shook the country Tuesday, with working class whites venting their economic and cultural frustration by lifting insurgent candidate Donald Trump to the presidency. A record gender gap was part of the result, as were dramatic divisions by race, region, religion, urban/rural status and […] Read more »
How Trump Won
The places that feel most left behind in a changing America propelled Donald Trump to a stunning victory over Hillary Clinton Tuesday night. In his unexpected win, Trump mobilized enormous margins among rural and exurban voters, and crushing advantages among blue-collar whites. In several cases, he prevented Clinton from making […] Read more »
The USC/L.A. Times poll saw what other surveys missed: A wave of Trump support
For most of the last four months, the USC/L.A. Times Daybreak tracking poll has been the great outlier of the 2016 campaign — consistently showing a better result for Donald Trump than other surveys did. In light of Tuesday’s election returns, the poll now looks like the only major survey […] Read more »
News Media Yet Again Misreads America’s Complex Pulse
All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country. For not the first time this year, the news […] Read more »
Failed Polls in 2016 Call Into Question a Profession’s Precepts
U.S. survey companies and media organizations that collectively presaged a close Hillary Clinton victory now face an autopsy on how they got it so wrong after a year suffused by polls, aggregates of polls and even real-time projections of the vote on Election Day. While the predictions gave some observers […] Read more »
Hillary Clinton will gain votes after Election Night. Here’s why.
Most Americans assume that by the wee hours of tomorrow, the national media will declare (unofficially, but still decisively) either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump our next president. Of course, the 2000 election showed that the result might not be settled so quickly. Considering how tight the polls have been, […] Read more »