… Trump’s failure to capture a plurality of the popular vote suggests he failed to live up to the potential created for him by situational factors over which neither he, nor Clinton, had any control. As I noted throughout the campaign, Clinton was running an uphill race based on the […] Read more »
Perceptions Are Not Reality: What the World Gets Wrong
Ipsos’ latest Perils of Perception survey highlights how wrong the public across 40 countries are about key global issues and features of the population in their country. The U.S. is one of the most “ignorant” of the facts of the nations surveyed. … Fieldwork for the survey was conducted the […] Read more »
Why the polls missed in 2016: Was it shy Trump supporters after all?
Following the unexpected victory of Donald Trump, the American Association for Public Opinion Research announced, “The polls clearly got it wrong … and already the chorus of concerns about a ‘crisis in polling’ have emerged.” Many forecasts based on polls were indeed wrong, but a closer look leaves us more […] Read more »
The Comey effect
… In mid-October, I said I didn’t think Trump would clear 240 electoral votes, a statement I paid for later by eating a bug on CNN. My error seems to be accounted for by two events: (1) undecided Republican voters coming home, and (2) FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter to […] Read more »
19 Things We Learned from the 2016 Election
OK, we can all agree that the November election result was a shocker. According to news reports, even the Trump campaign team was stunned to come up a winner. So now seemed like a good time to go over various theories floating around in political science and political reporting and […] Read more »
Which was the most accurate national poll in the 2016 presidential election?
An underappreciated fact about last month’s presidential election: the national polls were pretty accurate, on average. (The state polls are a different story.) … But this begs another question: which pollster or pollsters were the most accurate in 2016? As he did in 2008 and 2012, Fordham University political scientist […] Read more »