Araweelo News Network
A man hands a newspaper to a customer at a news stand in New York, November 9, 2016. (Photo by Reuters)
The unexpected victory of Donald Trump over heavily favored Hillary Clinton, who US polls had predicted would win the election, has thrown the future of the country’s polling industry into question.
Although most polls correctly predicted Clinton’s narrow popular-vote victory, virtually all surveys largely failed to forecast Trump’s rise to the presidency through securing the most votes from the Electoral College.
The prevailing question now is which polls will survive and what adjustments will be required to avoid another blunder. Many public polls have already disappeared as news organizations ended them amid deteriorating finances.
Of the 20 major polling institutions, only the University of Southern California Dornsife/Los Angeles Times (USC/LA Times) presidential election poll, consistently gave Trump the edge.
On Election Day, which was on Tuesday November 8, the RealClearPolitics rolling average showed Clinton ahead by 3.3 percentage points nationally. But just hours later, the polling community was offering a collective apology.
“The industry is definitely going to be spending a lot of time doing some soul-searching about what happened and where do we go from here,” says Chris Jackson, head of US public polling at Ipsos, the polling partner of Reuters.
FiveThirtyEight.com, a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis and was created by respected election forecaster Nate Silver, had forecast that Clinton had a 71 percent chance of beating Trump.
Many pollsters weight their samples based on the electorate as it was composed in prior election contests, but that was their mistake because polls simply underestimated the number of quiet, poll-avoiding Trump supporters, according to Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political professor and director of the school’s Center for Politics.
White turnout in rural America was through the roof,” Sabato said, while African-American and younger turnout was down.
The problem came down to the models the pollsters used to predict who would vote – the so-called likely voters, said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos Public Affairs US.
“The models almost universally miscalculated how turnout was distributed among different demographic groups,” Young said. And turnout was lower than expected, a result that generally favors Republican candidates.