2016 was a year of failure for political polling in several Western democracies. France, Britain and the U.S. were all taken by surprise after polls underestimated the support for conservative presidential candidates and Brexit. Now, pollsters in all three countries are reflecting on what went wrong. All Things Considered, NPR Read more »
Big Data’s Big Misses: 2016 Was a Bad Year For Predictions
Goodbye 2016. The journalists and analysts who work with numbers will not miss you. From the United States to the United Kingdom, the last 12 months will be remembered for missed calls, surprises and upsets that didn’t just beat the odds, but that shattered them – and not just in […] Read more »
State pollsters, pummeled by 2016, analyze what went wrong
… The 2016 election, which rewarded the media’s love of hyperbole, made fools of almost every prognosticator. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which had given Hillary Clinton a 71.4 percent chance of victory, came out better than most; Sam Wang, director of the Princeton Election Consortium, blew it so badly that he […] Read more »
The 2016 national polls are looking less wrong after final election tallies
UPDATE: This post from shortly after the November election has been updated to reflect accuracy of polls after states certified their vote counts. National polls were more accurate than they appeared immediately after the election, as Hillary Clinton’s two percentage-point advantage in the popular vote was similar to her three-point […] Read more »
How pollsters could use social media data to improve election forecasts
Donald Trump’s Nov. 8 victory surprised almost everyone. But if pollsters had looked at Twitter, they might have recognized that the race was close — or so we learned in our recent research. Even when polls were showing a big lead for Hillary Clinton, real-time analysis of social media was […] Read more »
In forecasting the 2016 election result, modelers had a good year. Pollsters did not.
The 2016 US election forecasting field was mostly divided up between the political science modelers, pollsters and poll aggregators. Pollsters and poll aggregators use national and state-level vote intention polls to make their forecasts, and are continually updating their forecasts until Election Day. The political science modelers apply theory and […] Read more »