Poll results were not the disaster widely percieved

Post Reply New Topic

The polls in 2016 have already gone down in the popular imagination on par with the 1948 "Dewey Wins" as a spactular failure.

It's official: Clinton swamps Trump in popular vote

Most of the final meta polls showed Clinton winning the national popular vote by 3 to 4 percent so the actual Clinton popular vote win of 2.1 percent was well within the margin of error. The false belief about the polls are due to several factors. In the "blue wall" states that decided the election most of the polls had Clinton winning by a narrow margin when the opposite occured. The national popular vote counts on election night when everybody was paying close attention were pretty even. Then the absentee ballots from California came in. By that time most were paying attention to Trump's appointments and thier Christmas shopping. Polling is a tool and most of the analysts like most people were utterly convinced Trump could not win especially after Clinton jumped to a seemingly comfortable to almost landslide level leads after the "hot mic" scandal. So convinced they were that they ignored a two basic rules of polling analysis look at the momentum and the aforementioned margin of error. Trump began cutting into Clinton's lead prior to the FBI inserting itself into the election. Polling results showed Trump's momentum stalled that final weekend. That allowed those who were getting nervous about Trump's momentum to relax and ignore margin of error.

"Polling descredited". "Fake news" that will be rarely challenged.