Donald Trump is President-Elect of the United States. Britain is leaving the European Union. Ed Miliband’s not Prime Minister. The past eighteen months have left the reputation of both pollsters and poll aggregators in tatters. … The polling misses in the United Kingdom and United States are damaging not just […] 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 »
Nate Silver Won’t Eat Crow
Election forecasters took a lot of blame for getting the outcome of the presidential race wrong. But Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, says the outrage is misplaced because journalists and the public were warned that the race was close. He admits that while there were polling errors, they weren’t out […] Read more »
Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result
Since Tuesday night, there has been a lot of handwringing about how the media, with all its fancy analytics, failed to foresee Donald Trump’s victory. … Whatever went wrong with the polls in this country, they inevitably colored perceptions. … The prediction models didn’t help things. On Tuesday morning, FiveThirtyEight’s […] 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 »
30% of Trump supporters say they’ll protest the election if he loses
After the votes are counted Tuesday night, how will Americans react if their candidate loses? Speculation abounds. Our recent surveys indicate that supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will respond differently, with Trump voters more likely to say they would protest the legitimacy of the election and encourage lawmakers […] Read more »