With the dust settling from one of the most brutal and nasty presidential campaigns in modern American history and with the late vote returns creeping up to a final count, it is time to take stock of the presidential election forecasts offered initially to readers of the Crystal Ball website […] Read more »
The forecasts were wrong. Trump won. What happened?
… Trump’s Election Day victory, with 306 electoral votes, took us by surprise. My forecast was wrong. It’s time to understand why. The forecast was based on a statistical model that analyzed nearly 1,400 state-level pre-election public opinion polls, in combination with a set of political and economic “fundamentals” that […] Read more »
Trade Secrets From the Predictors Who Called a Trump Victory
Now that the initial dust has settled from the historically surprising 2016 election, we all have one question: What went wrong with the polls and predictions? They showed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, sometimes handily. Just about everyone blew the call. Well, not everyone: There were some people who got […] Read more »
What happened to the polls?
Before diving into observations about the last Tuesday’s results, as a pollster, I feel compelled to write this first post-election column about the survey research misses. First, put the errors in perspective. CONT. Mark Mellman (Mellman Group), The Hill Read more »
Anyone for a second helping of crow?
… In most elections, the responses to survey questions about candidate qualities and vote preference predict the outcome. But this year was different. What I didn’t understand, of course, was that enough voters in just the right combination of states were so frustrated and angry with the status quo that […] Read more »
Why did pollsters like me fail to predict Trump’s victory?
America is being shaped irreversibly by a growing new majority of millennials, racial minorities, immigrants and secular people. So how did the presidential election produce such a reactionary result, surprising all the pollsters, including me? “Shy” Tories and Brexiters apparently upended Britain. Did “shy” Trump voters upend America? To understand […] Read more »