Posted on 02/12/2017 1:25:32 PM PST by NobleFree
[...] Here’s the thing. The loss of trust mostly isn’t the pollsters’ fault. It’s the media’s fault. Oh, yes, I’m going there. The loss of trust in polls was enabled, in large part, by reporting and analysis that incorrectly portrayed the polls as showing an almost-certain Clinton win when in fact they showed a close and highly uncertain Electoral College race , especially after FBI Director James B. Comey’s letter to Congress on Oct. 28 .
As my colleague Harry Enten put it a few days before the election , Trump was only a normal-size polling error away from winning. Clinton would win if the polls were spot on — and she’d win in a borderline landslide in the event of an error in her favor. But the third possibility — if the polls underestimated Trump, even slightly — would probably be enough for Trump to win the Electoral College . (That’s why FiveThirtyEight’s forecast during the final week of the campaign showed Trump with roughly a 1-in-3 chance of winning the Electoral College, dipping slightly to 29 percent on Election Day itself.)
That third possibility is pretty much exactly what happened. Trump beat the final FiveThirtyEight national polling average by only 1.8 percentage points. Meanwhile, he beat the final FiveThirtyEight polling average in the average swing state — weighted by its likelihood of being the tipping-point state — by 2.7 percentage points. (The miss was larger than that in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but Clinton met or slightly exceeded her polls in several other swing states.) This was nothing at all out of the ordinary. The polls were about as accurate as they’d been, on average, in presidential elections since 1968 . They were somewhat more accurate than they’d been in the most recent federal election, the 2014 midterms . But they were enough to tip the election to Trump because Clinton had been in a precarious position to begin with. [...]
NO!!!
They were probably done by the same pollsters that said Hilary was a shoe in. RED FLAG!
red
Nate Silver is a joke, and up until 8pm on election night he was still calling it for hillary
I’ll reread this and I believe you are right - I do disagree with the premise the polls were in the margin of error. I remember routinely seeing polls that were 4 and 5 % MOE which sucks. The pollsters were lying or are just bad, last week tightening or not. The tracking poll the Dornsfeld I believe was showing much more accurate numbers the whole time. I’m sticking with lying pollsters either that or bad ones. The fact they don’t know how to oversample should itself speak volumes about any poll across that population set. I’m having trouble understanding how poll companies get work after this and the Brexit debacle. Would you hire most of these outfits to do a poll for you after what we have seen? It appears you have to pay extra for MOE 3% and below. Silvers problem is he believes in statistics to give him predictive analytics to divine the future - He needs a more causal based math.
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