Posted on 11/13/2016 8:33:45 AM PST by Kaslin
How did the national polls, which overwhelmingly predicted a Hillary Clinton victory, get the presidential election so wrong? A Capitol Weekly election postmortem panel Thursday gave me the opportunity to ask California pollsters unaffiliated with the bad national polls. Mark DiCamillo of the Field Poll saw the Bradley effect with female Trump voters. (The "Bradley effect" was born in 1982 when the late pollster Mervin Field proclaimed that voters would elect Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to be California and America's first black governor. He was wrong, he believed, because voters would not admit to pollsters they supported George Deukmejian lest they appear racist.)
Many critics believe polls under-sampled white blue-collar voters. To which veteran pollster Jonathan Brown responded: "Answer your damn phones, people."
Pollster Rose Kapolczynski, who has worked for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, suggested that the news media and the public look at polls with more "skepticism." Sage advice.
All three pollsters noted that national polls correctly predicted Clinton's win in the popular vote, they just got the states wrong. (Problem: With the Electoral College, getting the states wrong sort of defeats the whole purpose of polling.)
"All the people who get lots of money on this were spectacularly wrong," Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me the day after the election. That frosts Olsen, because he crunched the numbers in a way that recognized how undecided and third-party voters tend to break toward their political parties. On election morning, he blogged that Clinton probably would prevail, but Donald Trump could confound conventional wisdom with a win.
"The analysts should have made the choice that I made," Olsen said.
Note Olsen did not predict a Trump win -- that would have been career suicide. His mere suggestion that Trump had a chance brought down the hammer of social media derision. By Wednesday, he looked like a prophet.
Two major polls -- the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll and the Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll -- put Trump ahead. Critics tried to get the L.A. Times poll kicked off the prestigious RealClearPolitics average of polls because it was an outlier.
Dan Schnur, a former aide to GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, director of USC's Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics and self-described "midwife" of the USC poll, endured his share of abuse. Many reporters, he believed, could not lash out at Trump, so they vented at his poll.
The pressure to conform must have been overwhelming. Schnur answered that his people "are very steadfast. They wouldn't have changed the methodology even if I begged them to."
During the panel, pollster Brown explained the phenomenon of "herding," where pollsters decide to reconfigure their numbers so that they fit other polls. Clearly, there is an institutional bias that pushes pollsters to ignore their own findings and stick to the so-called narrative. Later I asked Brown: Aren't pollsters nervous about pushing their data in the wrong direction. "It's better to be wrong with everyone," he replied.
The L.A. Times poll showed Trump ahead because of its unique methodology -- the poll followed individuals to discern their enthusiasm for a candidate. Clinton voters lacked enthusiasm, while Trump voters were stoked.
What should pollsters learn from 2016? Schnur noted that his poll missed the mark on the popular vote. The key isn't one approach, but for researchers to employ a wider range of methodologies. They also have to be open to new information that contradictions their assumptions.
In the meantime, many voters don't trust pollsters. From the audience, Oceanside attorney Laura Kennedy offered that she would never talk to a pollster. She's a Trump supporter who is sick of Clinton boosters calling Trump voters racists and idiots. "I'm not ashamed of it (her vote)," Kennedy noted. "I just don't want to listen to the backlash."
Pollsters, you have to make people want to answer the damn phone.
The news media don't help when they cover every movement in the polls -- as if polls are infallible -- instead of focusing on issues or listening to voters. Polls indicated a Clinton win. Once she was installed on top, pollsters questioned her lead at their professional peril. 2016 was the year of the polling bubble. Tuesday, the bubble burst.
Hogwash.
The “polls” were wrong because they had an agenda to dishearten the right and lower their propensity to vote. This explains the poll variance - those that sampled upwards of D+10, those that presumed 2012/2008 turnout (their plausible deniability), had Clinton in a landslide; the “outliers” were just professional pollsters.
Their plausible deniability are their excuses - oh, you didn’t answer your phones; oh, there was herding; oh, noes! noes!; etc, etc; and etc.
It shows they were manipulated.
No polls just line up like that, nor do they come out “tied” over and over again.
These people have always played with the numbers to get a result.
Sounds like the global warming models.
The talking heads claimed they got it wrong. No, they just flat out lied about it. SOP.
If anything it will discredit the whole industry, and finally shut up those on FR that bought their lies because “they were right in 2008 and 12”.
Gee, everyone is whining.
Reality impinges on political correctness as orthodoxy. The left is suffering a collective psychotic break. Can the nation survive? These people are a little scary. It’s like the Walking Dead out there. The left is not finished stomping out sanity. We have some rough days ahead.
While elections have “consequences”, so does this so-called herdish faux-polling. It has a major effect on the left where they feel the rug pulled out from under them, where they feel the election was stolen from them, where they felt entitled anyway, now they chant “Not my Pres”, scream and riot.
Occam’s razor: they lied.
His mere suggestion that Trump had a chance brought down the hammer of social media derision. By Wednesday, he looked like a prophet.
Two major polls — the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll and the Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll — put Trump ahead. Critics tried to get the L.A. Times poll kicked off the prestigious RealClearPolitics average of polls because it was an outlier.
Libs shut down dissent. Are surprised when polls don’t measure dissent.
I can’t tell you how many times I posted that the polls are just tools for rigging the system, exactly like the “hockey stick” data was for gorebal warming. Fiddling with some numbers in a spreadshee or just making them up out of thin air is nothing to people who stuff ballot boxes and start fistfights in rallies.
Of course they can never admit what they did, so we will continue to hear all sorts of explanations and excuses. Just remember, none of these people are our friends, nor friends of people like Donald Trump who threaten the grants and crony consulting and punditry kickbacks they exist on.
The only exception I know of is the Dornslife Daybreak poll which uses an entirely different methodology, and as a result, got it right. Watch for other reputable outfits (i.e. not the MSM or their cronies) to copy it in future elections.
“Answer your damn phones, people.”
Problem defined in a nutshell. Thanks to rampant telemarketing, scammers, and caller ID, nobody answers their phones anymore. If the don’t recognize the caller let it go to voicemail. If its important they will leave a message;
Five unanswered questions after Trump's upset victory 11/12/2016, 8:02:22 AM · 44 of 45
spokeshave to Gaffer
Hi Gaffer.......that is a great insight from Mrs Gaffer
She told me that the internal polling at his campaign looked at the cold hard truth, and early on when their polling operation noticed a reticence of some of those called to actually come out and say they'd vote for Trump (call it what you will - fear, silent voter, whatever)
so they changed up the questioning to something along the lines of "Who do you think your neighbor(s) will vote for?"
Shows how sharp the Trump Team was.
One major flaw is that they do not accept their raw data. They "massage" it with adjustments they arbitrarily develop to meet their models.
All these “explanations” are total BS. The people who did the polls, the people who paid for them, the news media itself WANTED Clinton to win and THEY were blind. All you had to do was go to a Trump rally and you would KNOW the outcome WITHOUT any damned data.
On Election Day afternoon over an hour before Indiana pills closed, I made my final prediction on my Facebook page. It was 314 for Trump and 224 for Hitler. I picked Wisconsin, Nevada, Colorado, and New Hampshire incorrectly. I got all 47 of the rest correct. I used ElectionProjection.com and my own weighting sheet adjustments on the national polls based on poll bias. Their methodologies, except for USC and Ibd, we’re obviously biased by 2.2% on average. This meant that anything inside 4.3% margin prediction for Clinton had to go the other way. Nevertheless I still thought the Election was too close to call. And we should never forget that it was too close to call. Trump will have a successful presidency as we encourage him to do right.
“The “Bradley effect” was born in 1982 when the late pollster Mervin Field proclaimed that voters would elect Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to be California and America’s first black governor. He was wrong, he believed, because voters would not admit to pollsters they supported George Deukmejian lest they appear racist.”
Obama’s “popularity” was just outed by the Bradley effect; American voters rejected him and his fake legacy.
Outside of some (not all) black & Hispanic co-workers, I’ve met nobody with a favorable opinion of Obama personally or in his capacity as president. He is a failure, carried by the media through two terms until the truth collapsed the whole house of cards.
If you erase the 6+ million illegal alien and dead people vote, the USC poll was pretty accurate, certainly much more accurate than the MSM polls.
Despite the fact that dead democrats continue to vote, they are unable to participate in polls.
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