Planes rarely crash because one instrument fails or one gauge gives a bad reading. Rather, the right combination of things fail in tandem — a mechanical problem paired with bad weather, a backup system malfunctioning at the same time as a pilot error — leading to catastrophe. The disaster of […] Read more »
National Polling Accurately Nails Popular Vote
This was a complex election since Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and Donald Trump won the Electoral College. In terms of forecasting, being “right” means two different things, depending on whether you were estimating the former or the latter. … In terms of predicting the national popular vote outcome, […] Read more »
Why I Had to Eat a Bug on CNN
LAST weekend I ate a cricket on national television. Based on my statistical analysis of presidential polls, I made a bet that if Donald J. Trump won more than 240 Electoral College votes, I would chow down. Like millions of voters in both parties, I was surprised by the outcome. […] Read more »
Polls may be making voters worse at predicting elections
Blaming the polls for getting the 2016 election so wrong is understandable, but there was arguably a bigger problem: the false confidence that the polls inspired. Indeed, the flood of polls may be having a perverse consequence: making voters worse at predicting the election, not better. And the media landscape […] Read more »
What will pollsters do after 2016?
Jason Husser, Elon University Clinton defeated Trump much like Dewey defeated Truman. Both election results were dramatic surprises because pre-election polls created expectations that didn’t match the final outcomes. Many polls were very accurate. For example, the polling averages in Virginia, Colorado and Arizona were within 0.1 percent of the […] Read more »
Is polling dead?
Donald Trump is President-Elect of the United States. Britain is leaving the European Union. Ed Miliband’s not Prime Minister. The past eighteen months have left the reputation of both pollsters and poll aggregators in tatters. … The polling misses in the United Kingdom and United States are damaging not just […] Read more »