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there is apparent proof of dubious tactics in [...] their failure to call the election polling close I just want to address this one point. I think it's just u

there is apparent proof of dubious tactics in [...] their failure to call the election polling close I just want to address this one point. I think it's just untenable to imagine there was some big conspiracy to skew poll numbers in Clinton's favour. Why would all the pollsters fall in line, why wouldn't anyone break ranks and leak the story? It would be a huge story that would sell a ton of newspapers! The pollsters were mostly wrong, but they were fairly close, only a couple of points off. Just about everybody (notably the Princeton Election Consortium) was way overconfident, with the exception of FiveThirtyEight who gave Clinton a 70-30 chance over Trump. That's not a bad guess given the final result. FiveThirtyEight never claimed to be correcting anyone else's bias, they just clearly stated their reasons for thinking the result was very uncertain. It's a shame nobody else followed their lead but you can bet they will next time round. The one big outlier was the LA Times poll, which consistently put Trump ahead, but they put him way ahead, so they were actually one of the less accurate polls in absolute terms. It will be really interesting to see what caused that overall ~2% polling miss, but I would bet a large sum of money that it wasn't "dubious tactics". The worst we should accuse the media of is overconfidence. (For example, a few left-leaning outlets accused FiveThirtyEight of gaming the system in Trump's favour; that just makes them look stupid in hindsight.)

ipnon 10y ago
If anything, Clinton's campaign would want to give the appearance that the race was actually closer than it was, because this would give a sense of urgency to Democratic voters and increase turnout. You can see the same principle from the time before the first debate when Clinton's campaign was exaggerating Trump's ability to debate on live television in order to give the appearance of a comeback. The reality was that Clinton always had the advantage in terms of traditional debating and her campaign knew it. If we can say anything about this election perhaps it is that reality (the mathematical/objective one) has taken a surprisingly minor role ...

ipnon 10y ago

If anything, Clinton's campaign would want to give the appearance that the race was actually closer than it was, because this would give a sense of urgency to Democratic voters and increase turnout. You can see the same principle from the time before the first debate when Clinton's campaign was exaggerating Trump's ability to debate on live television in order to give the appearance of a comeback. The reality was that Clinton always had the advantage in terms of traditional debating and her campaign knew it. If we can say anything about this election perhaps it is that reality (the mathematical/objective one) has taken a surprisingly minor role ...