{"id":108,"date":"2017-01-20T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/wordpress\/almostclassical\/?p=108"},"modified":"2025-01-09T22:09:34","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T04:09:34","slug":"polls-were-not-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/2017\/01\/20\/polls-were-not-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Polls Were NOT Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stop blaming polls or calling them “wrong<\/strong>” because only the Huffington Post<\/a> polling was seriously flawed. Every other model actually offered accurate ranges of potential outcomes<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The polls were not wrong. Polls give probability not certainty. They were accurate. If I tell you Hillary Clinton<\/a> 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<\/a> has attempted to explain this with the example of Pennsylvania<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t the polls: It was the pundits<\/a><\/p>\n

What occurred wasn\u2019t a failure of the polls. As with Brexit<\/a>, 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!<\/strong>] The correct interpretation was that, if Clinton\u2019s actual vote share were just one point lower and Trump\u2019s just one point higher, Trump would be tied or even a bit ahead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The best polls were within margins of error<\/a>. 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<\/a> and Sean Trende have explained repeatedly the polls were accurate within their margins. We’re not going to get 0.1% error from polling.<\/p>\n

People simply did not want the “worst case” scenario, and the press didn’t explain with maps: “Here are the two extreme outcomes.”<\/p>\n

Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight<\/a> has promised a lengthy analysis but has already stated that polling didn\u2019t fail us. Again, the commentators and reporters didn\u2019t explain probability clearly. It\u2019s not sexy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo by ewedistrict<\/a> <\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1533,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"iawp_total_views":1,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[80,221,244,237,290,98,427,79],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-trump","tag-elections","tag-fivethirtyeight","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-nate-silver","tag-polling","tag-sean-trende","tag-statistics","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2024\/03\/AC_Banner_Gray_1200x630.png?fit=1200%2C630&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfivL7-1K","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1446,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/1446"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}