I think I disagree with Sean Trende’s defense of the polls at RealClearPolitics:
There is a fast-building meme that Donald Trump’s surprising win on Tuesday reflected a failure of the polls. This is wrong. The story of 2016 is not one of poll failure. It is a story of interpretive failure and a media environment that made it almost taboo to even suggest that Donald Trump had a real chance to win the election.
I think the polls and the pundits failed and those were a consequence of some combination of herd behavior and systematic bias. For example:
The final RCP Four-Way National Poll Average showed Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by 3.3 points. She will probably win the popular vote by a point or so, which would equate to an error of around two points.
and yet as of this writing Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by .2%. Based on what we know now the RCP Four-Way was off by 3.1 points and that’s too much. Clearly something else was at work in the polls.
And this:
Sometimes polls are a little more favorable to toward Democrats, while other times they are more favorable toward Republicans.
If some polls are more favorable to Democrats while others are more favorable to Democrats, that’s one thing. When most of the polls are favorable to one party or the other all of the time, that’s systematic bias.
I think the polls and the pundits were both wrong and that will be hashed out endlessly for the next century.
I don’t think they are that good at predicting who will actually vote.
Steve
We can go back to augury, it would save money, be just as accurate and we know how seriously how to take it.
As someone who made a pretty good guess at the outcome, I would say the biggest bias was not against republicans, but a bias for the status quo. For pollsters and pundits who make a living predicting the future, it’s career suicide to predict what few predict and be wrong. And usually, predicting the status quo is easy because it is usually right. I certainly felt like a fool moments after I pressed submit on my prediction even through I was pretty confident in how I came to my conclusion.
By the way, it’s been mentioned elsewhere but it should be repeated. The polls were off about 2% off for Clinton. In 2012, it was also 2% off, but for Obama. We forget because the error reinforced the status quo.
I’ve mentioned it before but I canvassed most of my ward multiple times. One of the things that I learned was that canvassing the few Republicans in the ward was a lot harder than canvassing the Democrats.
The polls may have an element of the “drunkard’s search” in them.