Heading into Election Day, virtually all public polling — at the national and swing-state level — pointed to a relatively easy victory for Democrat Hillary Clinton. That, um, didn’t happen. In search of the “why” behind that poll fail, I contacted my longtime friend Jon Cohen. Jon was once the […] Read more »
Explanations for that shocking 2% shift
The title of this post says it all. A 2% shift in public opinion is not so large and usually would not be considered shocking. In this case the race was close enough that 2% was consequential. Here’s the background: Four years ago, Mitt Romney received 48% of the two-party […] Read more »
The Shock Heard ‘Round the World
I got it wrong. Really wrong. Trump didn’t just win, he crushed it. This is truly the most shocking thing that I have seen in my lifetime. So, what happened? We are going to be digging through the data for a while. But, at its core the Obama coalition lost […] Read more »
Why did many polls seem to miss a Trump victory?
Most polls heading into the Nov. 8 presidential election predicted Hillary Clinton would win the presidency. Two weeks before people lined up to vote, famed poll aggregator Nate Silver at the FiveThirtyEight website put her odds of winning at up to 85 percent. When he later gave Trump a 35 […] Read more »
US pollsters’ failure to forecast Trump victory is a ‘massive, historical, epic disaster’
The British academic who led an official review into how pollsters failed to forecast the result of the 2015 general election said their’ failure to predict Donald Trump’s clear victory is a “massive disaster” for the polling industry which is “high up the Richter scale”. CONT. Christopher Hope, The Telegraph Read more »
How could the polling be so wrong?
The signs of a polling disaster were all there, but almost no one besides Donald Trump was paying attention. CONT. Steven Shepard, Politico Read more »