America is being shaped irreversibly by a growing new majority of millennials, racial minorities, immigrants and secular people. So how did the presidential election produce such a reactionary result, surprising all the pollsters, including me? “Shy” Tories and Brexiters apparently upended Britain. Did “shy” Trump voters upend America? To understand […] Read more »
4 Possible Reasons The Polls Got It So Wrong This Year
If you followed the presidential polls at all closely, chances are that you expected Hillary Clinton to win last week. So did all of the major prediction models that use polls to game out election outcome probabilities. … Pollsters will be digging for months (at least) to figure out how […] Read more »
Presidential Forecast Post-Mortem
“All models are wrong,” the statistician George Box once said. This year was no exception. On Oct. 18, a model built by Donald J. Trump’s campaign gave him an 8 percent chance of winning, Bloomberg has reported. At that point in the race, The Upshot’s model gave him the same […] Read more »
‘Demographics Aren’t Destiny’ And Four Other Things This Election Taught Me
The 2016 election is in the books. Donald Trump won; Hillary Clinton lost. But it will take a while — weeks and months — to sift through the results, so be wary of any stories drawing sweeping conclusions about the country (it’s still the same nation that elected President Obama […] Read more »
The Importance of Embracing Ambiguity — and What Comes Next for Polling
Instead of offering definitive answers to the country’s biggest questions, the 2016 election results provoke even larger questions. How could the forecasters and the campaigns themselves been so wrong? What and maybe who did all the pollsters miss? Was there a late breaking voter phenomenon that was hard to measure? […] Read more »
As it turns out, James Comey is a great scapegoat for Hillary Clinton’s loss
There is no conceivable way that FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute update to Congress about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server was beneficial to her. It was never likely to sway a lot of opinions, given that most attitudes on the subject had been formulated well before voting began […] Read more »