Since Tuesday night, there has been a lot of handwringing about how the media, with all its fancy analytics, failed to foresee Donald Trump’s victory. … Whatever went wrong with the polls in this country, they inevitably colored perceptions. … The prediction models didn’t help things. On Tuesday morning, FiveThirtyEight’s […] Read more »
Election surprise, and three ways of thinking about probability
Background: Hillary Clinton was given a 65% or 80% or 90% chance of winning the electoral college. She lost. Naive view: The poll-based models and the prediction markets said Clinton would win, and she lost. The models are wrong! CONT. Andrew Gelman, Columbia U. Read more »
What the Polls Were Never Going to Reveal
… While many Americans are surprised by the result, the people who populate the punditry class are truly shocked by it. I’m one of them. Many of us relied on a set of polls that were structurally off by two or three points in favor of Clinton, and exit polls […] Read more »
Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else
Based on what most of us would have thought possible a year or two ago, the election of Donald Trump was one of the most shocking events in American political history. But it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise based on the polls — at least if you […] Read more »
Things Poll Apart
“It was around 9:20 p.m. when conventional wisdom died,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Neil King on election night. That was the moment when the New York Times’s website began projecting that a Donald Trump victory was more likely than not, and it became abundantly obvious that the presidential polls […] Read more »
Epic fail: How a mid-sized error led to a rash of bad forecasts
… While pollsters correctly gauged the sentiment of most slices of the electorate, they underestimated Mr Trump’s appeal to working-class whites. Although it was clear that he would run up the score with these voters, he managed to exceed even pollsters’ rosy expectations for him: projected to win them by […] Read more »