Pollsters and election modelers suffered an industry-shattering embarrassment at the hands of Donald Trump on Tuesday night. Trump had long said the polls were biased against him. His claims – dismissed and mocked by the experts – turned out to be true. “It’s going to put the polling industry out […] Read more »
Yes, the polls were wrong. Here’s why
The polls were wrong. And because we are obsessed with predicting opinions rather than listening to them, we didn’t see it coming. So, the world woke up believing that Republican candidate Donald Trump had a 15% chance of winning based on polling predictions – roughly the same chance of rolling […] Read more »
The USC/L.A. Times poll saw what other surveys missed: A wave of Trump support
For most of the last four months, the USC/L.A. Times Daybreak tracking poll has been the great outlier of the 2016 campaign — consistently showing a better result for Donald Trump than other surveys did. In light of Tuesday’s election returns, the poll now looks like the only major survey […] Read more »
News Media Yet Again Misreads America’s Complex Pulse
All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country. For not the first time this year, the news […] Read more »
Failed Polls in 2016 Call Into Question a Profession’s Precepts
U.S. survey companies and media organizations that collectively presaged a close Hillary Clinton victory now face an autopsy on how they got it so wrong after a year suffused by polls, aggregates of polls and even real-time projections of the vote on Election Day. While the predictions gave some observers […] Read more »
Final PollyVote forecast: Clinton will win
All numbers are in and, according to the PollyVote, Hillary Clinton will become the first female president of the United States. Clinton will win the popular vote by 5.0 percentage points in the two-party vote (52.5% vs. 47.5%). Based on the PollyVote’s historical error, Clinton’s chance to win is above […] Read more »