If you followed the presidential polls at all closely, chances are that you expected Hillary Clinton to win last week. So did all of the major prediction models that use polls to game out election outcome probabilities. … Pollsters will be digging for months (at least) to figure out how […] Read more »
Presidential Forecast Post-Mortem
“All models are wrong,” the statistician George Box once said. This year was no exception. On Oct. 18, a model built by Donald J. Trump’s campaign gave him an 8 percent chance of winning, Bloomberg has reported. At that point in the race, The Upshot’s model gave him the same […] Read more »
What Happened? How Pollsters, Pundits, And Politics Got It Wrong
The election of Donald Trump came as a shock to many Americans, but perhaps most of all to those in the business of calling elections. The pollsters on both left and right had confidently predicted Hillary Clinton would walk away with the race. They got it wrong. But one man […] Read more »
‘Demographics Aren’t Destiny’ And Four Other Things This Election Taught Me
The 2016 election is in the books. Donald Trump won; Hillary Clinton lost. But it will take a while — weeks and months — to sift through the results, so be wary of any stories drawing sweeping conclusions about the country (it’s still the same nation that elected President Obama […] Read more »
The Importance of Embracing Ambiguity — and What Comes Next for Polling
Instead of offering definitive answers to the country’s biggest questions, the 2016 election results provoke even larger questions. How could the forecasters and the campaigns themselves been so wrong? What and maybe who did all the pollsters miss? Was there a late breaking voter phenomenon that was hard to measure? […] Read more »
Issue-handling beats leadership: Issues and Leaders model predicts Clinton will defeat Trump
The Issues and Leaders model predicts the national popular two-party vote in US presidential elections from people’s perceptions of the candidates’ issue-handling competence and leadership qualities. In previous elections from 1972 to 2012, the model’s Election Eve forecasts missed the actual vote shares by, on average, little more than one […] Read more »