In the wake of the surprising Brexit vote in the UK, headlines around the globe have declared potential lessons for the US. presidential election—populist movements across the world taking back their countries, an angry working class rejecting the status quo, and Donald Trump at the center of the same sentiments […] Read more »
Exit Polls, and Why the Primary Was Not Stolen From Bernie Sanders
The background music of my life is the steady drumbeat of tweets about how Hillary Clinton stole the presidential primary from Bernie Sanders. … The allegations are remarkably consistent. They go like this: Mr. Sanders did better in the early exit polls than he did in the final result. Therefore, […] Read more »
Brexit Is Not The Same Thing As Trump
What can Brexit tell us about how our own election is going? Republican pollsters say not much: Unlike the Republican primaries, when Donald Trump led polls to disbelief from elites — not unlike elite reaction to Leave voters in the United Kingdom — Trump trails in general election polling currently. […] Read more »
Performance of the polls in the EU referendum
Seven member companies issued ‘final’ polls of voting intentions in the EU referendum. While no company forecast the eventual result exactly, in three cases the result was within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus three points. In one case Leave were correctly estimated to be ahead. In […] Read more »
Alarmed Britons Ask Pollsters: Why Didn’t You Warn Us?
Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has left no shortage of losers: Prime Minister David Cameron, the pound sterling and the European Union itself. But it also exposed a familiar culprit: the pollsters. CONT. Dan Bilefsky, New York Times Read more »
Brexit: What Happened?
When considering the myriad of predictions before Brexit, when it comes to polling, financial markets, and prediction markets, there are certainly some bright spots and some concern: First, polling did pretty well, depending on what polls you cherry picked. … Second, financial markets did really bad at predicting. CONT. David […] Read more »