The Issues and Leaders model predicts the national popular two-party vote in US presidential elections from people’s perceptions of the candidates’ issue-handling competence and leadership qualities. In previous elections from 1972 to 2012, the model’s Election Eve forecasts missed the actual vote shares by, on average, little more than one […] Read more »
The Gist podcast: The Fault in Our Polls
FiveThirtyEight’s @ForecasterEnten explains polling error, and Princeton’s @julianzelizer puts the 2016 election in historical context. CONT. Mike Pesca, The Gist Read more »
Why Trump won: It was fundamental!
… As it turned out, however, the political science models – looked at in the aggregate, (which is how I typically made my prediction every four years) – were spot on in 2016. As of today, with votes still coming in, Clinton has won about 50.2% of the popular vote […] Read more »
Putting the Polling Miss of the 2016 Election in Perspective
It was the biggest polling miss in a presidential election in decades. Yet in many ways, it wasn’t wholly out of the ordinary. Over all, the national polls missed the result by only a few points: Hillary Clinton is on track to win the popular vote by around 1.5 percentage […] Read more »
The polls didn’t fail. We just chose to ignore the math
There’s a lot of talk right now that polling failed. But Trump’s win was hardly an unpredictable “black swan” event. All the evidence was there, if you knew how to read it. In fact, the polls did ok, 2016 was not even a particularly large miss by historical standards. … […] Read more »
There may have been shy Trump supporters after all
… Could Trump’s social undesirability have mattered for pre-election polls? The challenge here is that people refuse to answer survey questions in a variety of ways. Hiding your views need not mean lying. It could mean saying that you’re undecided or simply not taking the poll at all. CONT. Elizabeth […] Read more »