Trump’s poll and forecast-defying victory Tuesday immediately raised criticisms of a crisis in public opinion polling, with CNN anchor Jake Tapper saying the result would put the polling and voter projection industry “out of business.” … An analysis of 145 polls nationally and in 16 states completed within one week […] Read more »
Trump’s Data Team Saw a Different America—and They Were Right
Nobody saw it coming. Not the media. Certainly not Hillary Clinton. Not even Donald Trump’s team of data scientists, holed up in their San Antonio headquarters 1,800 miles from Trump Tower, were predicting this outcome. But the scientists picked up disturbances—like falling pressure before a hurricane—that others weren’t seeing. It […] Read more »
The Data Said Clinton Would Win. Why You Shouldn’t Have Believed It.
It was a rough night for number crunchers. And for the faith that people in every field — business, politics, sports and academia — have increasingly placed in the power of data. Donald J. Trump’s victory ran counter to almost every major forecast — undercutting the belief that analyzing reams […] Read more »
USC Dornsife/L.A. Times ‘outlier’ poll rings true as Donald Trump wins
Ever since the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Presidential Election Daybreak Poll debuted in July, media observers have labeled it an “outlier”: Its results differed from those of other polls, regularly reporting positive numbers for Donald Trump. The poll, led by USC’s Arie Kapteyn and Jill Darling, has piqued interest and […] Read more »
The Polls and Predictors Were Off, But Not By as Much as it Seems
Going into Election Day, political forecasters predicted the most likely outcome was a victorious Hillary Clinton, a Democratic Senate, and the House still firmly in Republican hands. Instead, Donald J. Trump emerged as the 45th president of the United States, while the GOP managed to hold on to both houses […] Read more »
Why 2016 election polls missed their mark
The results of Tuesday’s presidential election came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling, which consistently projected Hillary Clinton as defeating Donald Trump. Relying largely on opinion polls, election forecasters put Clinton’s chance of winning at anywhere from 70% to as […] Read more »