I've been listening to 538 for the past few weeks. I'll try and sum up what I've gleaned from their thoughts before the election and after. A few of the elect

I've been listening to 538 for the past few weeks. I'll try and sum up what I've gleaned from their thoughts before the election and after. A few of the election night podcasts I didn't get to listen to until after the election, which helps to see what they were over-confident about or what they're backpedaling about today. While I think it was 70/30 for Clinton they were very explicit that this doesn't mean Clinton will win. They admitted it's very difficult to convey probabilities to the average person and it's something they're still working on. I feel like a lot of the pundits (honestly, on Trump's side, too) seemed to believe Hillary winning was inevitable and the night was just going to play out like the predictions, but the polls and analysts were saying it was going to be close (although, Hillary was favored). While Clinton had a confident lead in the popular vote, her electoral map was rocky. She had thin margins in a bunch of contentious states, but in states like California and Texas she got fairly large numbers in individuals that wouldn't translate into electoral votes. When it came to the vote she just lost the contentious states. Something else they said today is that pollsters see outliers (changes from the norm) as possible noise, so they tend to bias that back to historical values or neighboring values. This can hide pockets of change or make trends slower to show up. The last election was Obama obviously he appealed to different groups of people. Many assumed the areas he flipped would stay flipped. That's why pollsters were off almost as much as 10% in some areas instead of the expected 3%. Another thing I've heard toyed around is that public polls are funded by universities and newspapers--institutions who haven't had as much money lately. So while analysis of polls have gotten better, polls have gotten worse. There's also talk about landlines falling out of favor and online polling being worse. Campaign polls have gotten better since there's more money now. From what I've heard Romney's internal polls were way off, but Obama's polls were spot on. I've heard both Hillary's and Trump's internal polls had Hillary ahead...so all of that might be irrelevant. It was a close race and the unconventional nature made it difficult to honestly predict. But most predictions ended up close to the margin of error--they just guessed the winner with too much confidence.