… Trump’s Election Day victory, with 306 electoral votes, took us by surprise. My forecast was wrong. It’s time to understand why. The forecast was based on a statistical model that analyzed nearly 1,400 state-level pre-election public opinion polls, in combination with a set of political and economic “fundamentals” that […] Read more »
‘Shy’ Voters Probably Aren’t Why The Polls Missed Trump
Donald Trump won the presidential election despite polls that indicated Hillary Clinton was favored. One popular explanation for this is that some people were afraid to admit to pollsters that they supported Trump — what’s being called the “shy Trump” phenomenon. … It will probably be weeks or months before […] Read more »
Trade Secrets From the Predictors Who Called a Trump Victory
Now that the initial dust has settled from the historically surprising 2016 election, we all have one question: What went wrong with the polls and predictions? They showed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, sometimes handily. Just about everyone blew the call. Well, not everyone: There were some people who got […] Read more »
Did Moderates Help Elect Trump?
During elections, most public opinion surveys try to identify likely voters and use them to predict the winner. Working with our students at Cornell University, we took a different approach by focusing on respondents who said they did not intend to vote for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump. In our […] Read more »
What happened to the polls?
Before diving into observations about the last Tuesday’s results, as a pollster, I feel compelled to write this first post-election column about the survey research misses. First, put the errors in perspective. CONT. Mark Mellman (Mellman Group), The Hill Read more »
Anyone for a second helping of crow?
… In most elections, the responses to survey questions about candidate qualities and vote preference predict the outcome. But this year was different. What I didn’t understand, of course, was that enough voters in just the right combination of states were so frustrated and angry with the status quo that […] Read more »