Stop blaming polls or calling them “wrong” because only the Huffington Post polling was seriously flawed. Every other model actually offered accurate ranges of potential outcomes.
The polls were not wrong. Polls give probability not certainty. They were accurate. If I tell you Hillary Clinton has an 85% chance of winning… hello? She still has a 15% chance of losing. People didn’t want to accept that. They assumed 85% = she can’t lose. Sean Trende has attempted to explain this with the example of Pennsylvania. The commonwealth was a close election: so close that one percent in both directions did change the winner, but that does not make the polls incorrect.
It wasn’t the polls: It was the pundits
What occurred wasn’t a failure of the polls. As with Brexit, it was a failure of punditry. Pundits saw Clinton with a 1.9 percent lead in Pennsylvania and assumed she would win. [Note: Margin of error was 3% in most polling!] The correct interpretation was that, if Clinton’s actual vote share were just one point lower and Trump’s just one point higher, Trump would be tied or even a bit ahead.
The best polls were within margins of error. I wish people would stop claiming all polls were “wrong” since they were better than most previous elections. This was a close election, as a 3% to 5% margin of error is just what it says — a margin. People assumed a lot, but Nate Silver and Sean Trende have explained repeatedly the polls were accurate within their margins. We’re not going to get 0.1% error from polling.
People simply did not want the “worst case” scenario, and the press didn’t explain with maps: “Here are the two extreme outcomes.”
Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight has promised a lengthy analysis but has already stated that polling didn’t fail us. Again, the commentators and reporters didn’t explain probability clearly. It’s not sexy.
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