One of the big stories of the 2016 presidential election is just how wrong the polls were. The surveys in the final days of the campaign settled on Hillary Clinton defeating Donald Trump by around four points and winning a solid majority of Electoral College votes. The votes are still […] Read more »
5 Theories Of Why The Polls Failed So Hard
As Nov. 8 dawned, it all seemed so clear: National polls predicted that Hillary Clinton would prevail. Polls conducted at the state level, meanwhile, indicated that a “blue firewall” of Democratic-leaning states would comfortably propel her to victory in the electoral college. … But in states with close battles, where […] Read more »
What A Difference 2 Percentage Points Makes
Here’s the Electoral College map we’re going to end up with, assuming that every uncalled state goes to the candidate leading in the vote count there as of 4 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. There’s a sea of red for President-elect Donald Trump. He earned 306 electoral votes and became […] Read more »
The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.
The polls missed Donald Trump’s election. Individual polls missed, at the state level and nationally (though national polls weren’t far off). So did aggregated polls. So did poll-based forecasts such as ours. And so did exit polls. … Pollsters will need weeks or months to sort through what happened, and […] Read more »
Results call future of political polling into question
For pollsters, the 2016 presidential election will go down as more than an embarrassment — it threatens to spiral into an existential crisis. At the moment we needed them most, when the nation was desperate for accurate projections, many pollsters whiffed. Although most correctly predicted Hillary Clinton’s narrow popular-vote victory, […] Read more »
Explanations for that shocking 2% shift
The title of this post says it all. A 2% shift in public opinion is not so large and usually would not be considered shocking. In this case the race was close enough that 2% was consequential. Here’s the background: Four years ago, Mitt Romney received 48% of the two-party […] Read more »