[KayEyeDoubleDee]

Either a result was within its poll's MOE or it was not as compared to the actual election results

I'm not trying to be a critic here, and I totally appreciate your efforts. However, I am almost positive that, for example, a MOE of 5% means something like "there is a 90% chance that the actual results will lie within +/-5% of the poll results." Anyway, something to think about.

[heleny]

a MOE of 5% means something like "there is a 90% chance that the actual results will lie within +/-5% of the poll results."

Some of the polls stated something like that, but the newspapers or TV news charts often simply say the MOE was 5%, and it's often left out entirely in oral TV/radio news.

Maybe they couldn't predict the dynamics of the actual voters this time, because voters were motivated in ways not typical of the usual elections. If they had realized this, the polls should have claimed an 80% or lower accuracy.

[Wolfstar]

A margin of error gives a pollster a plus or minus swing within which he can claim to be right. A typical MOE is +/- 3% of the percentage the pollster arrives at for a candidate or issue. Let's use an example of 45% +/- 3%. The pollster can claim to be right if the percent of the vote comes out at 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, or 48 percent.

[undeniable logic]

I was going to comment on the MOE. It's true that the margin of error may be stated so that there is a 90% chance that the results lie within +- 5%, but even so, when you see how off all the polls are, something is still way off.

For example, there is a 90% chance that the result lies within +-5%. But there may be a 99% chance that the results lies within +-10%. The probability of 20 polls being off by 10% is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001%.

While statistically, the MOE may be +-5%, that is assuming that the polls are conducted perfectly - it very well may be that the MOE for an actual poll is much higher, due to errors in polling.