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Why Key State Polls Were Wrong About Trump in the National Election

Jun 1, 2017  •  Post A Comment

Polling experts have zeroed in on a number of reasons that the polls failed to accurately forecast the outcome of the presidential election last November.

The New York Times reports that the subject got a lot of attention this month at the annual conference of the American Association of Public Opinion Research in New Orleans.

“At least three key types of error have emerged as likely contributors to the pro-Clinton bias in pre-election surveys,” The Times reports. “Undecided voters broke for Mr. Trump in the final days of the race, or in the voting booth. Turnout among Mr. Trump’s supporters was somewhat higher than expected. And state polls, in particular, understated Mr. Trump’s support in the decisive Rust Belt region, in part because those surveys did not adjust for the educational composition of the electorate — a key to the 2016 race.”

9 Comments

  1. The implication that those who voted for Trump are less educated indicates the pollsters have the same attitude about the middle of the country as Hillary. They also didn’t factor the intimidation factor for anyone that said anything positive about Trump. That is why the voting booth is closed.

    • Well anyone who said anything positive about Trump’s campaign was lying, so…

      And it’s not/was not that way everywhere, for sure. I encounter lots of “loud and proud” Trump voters here in TN. None of them can articulate anything good about him though, still. Even among supporters, his biggest qualification appears to be that he has a “Y” chromosome and wasn’t running as a registered Democrat.

      • Oh please stop with the nonsense.

        While the left is freaking out about everything Trump has done to date, everything he’s done to date is why people voted for him.

        Just in the past few days we’ve pulled out of the horrid Paris climate accord, and the Dakota Access Pipeline has started transporting oil – both big wins and very positive indeed.

  2. The pollsters may have egg on their face now – but they didn’t get it wrong. Their job was to attempt to influence the outcome, not predict it. To that end they “assigned” undecided to Hillary and over sampled liberal and Democrat likely voters. Right up until the counting started the exit polls were being reported to be solidly for Hillary. But her campaign had actual results which sent Hillary into hiding. Entertainers have been cautioned for years not to believe their own press releases. Looks like Hillary’s campaign workers forgot to tell her the the propaganda polls were not real.

    • That makes no sense on its face. If the pollsters were “in the bag” for Mrs. Clinton (I guess they discussed in their annual Pollster Convention, I guess?), don’t you think it would have made more sense to run around like Chicken Little screaming that idiots were going to flood the polls for Trump and defeat her? All the predictions of a landslide victory for Clinton did was depress turnout for her base who thought it was a “done deal”, seems to me.

      If they are “smart” enough to conspire together to manipulate the electorate, then why would they be “dumb” enough to shoot themselves in the foot like that? Can you answer that?

  3. Please explain to me what The New York Times revealed in this story that wasn’t being theorized six months ago. This is just recycled analysis.

  4. They got it wrong probably because of wanting to influence (“bully?”) the outcome: Pro-Hillary.

    • I’ll ask you, too– why would someone who wanted a candidate to win a contest based on voter turnout act to help that candidate by telling everyone she were going to win no problem, gonna be a landslide. That probably kept a lot of people at home.

      I mean, I wasn’t worried for one second about Trump until he actually won. I thought for sure the country had more sense than that, collectively. I was just as wrong as the polling organizations, it seems. America really is THAT dumb.

      • The voters are that smart; it’s the so-called media intelligentsia who have lost touch with reality.

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