{"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. 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