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The Economist had a very compelling graphic for how the polling went wrong [0]. Essentially, results were within the margin of error, but the errors (positive a
by mercutio2 10y ago
The Economist had a very compelling graphic for how the polling went wrong [0]. Essentially, results were within the margin of error, but the errors (positive and negative) in a given state were strongly correlated with the percent of the white electorate with no college education.
538 made the compelling (and in the end, sadly accurate) statistical point that modeling errors in polls are very likely to be correlated across states, not independent like a lottery.
Nate Silver's reputation went up again for me in this election.
[0] - http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21710024-how-mid-sized-error-led-rash-bad-forecasts-epic-fail http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21710024-how-mid...
- hga 10y agoThe man who completely called it wrong WRT to Trump in the primaries, and I seem to remember seeing a Tweet where he called both the final election and the World Series wrong (and the latter domain is where he first made his bones)? I've gotten the general impression that while he might have done not as badly as others in this last minute polling, in general he did not cover himself in glory in 2016, and here I rate it by an org's confidence in their numbers. But I didn't follow this at all closely, for it was obvious to me all or almost all the public polls were getting it seriously wrong, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930950