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If those polls were measuring just raw voter preference rather than controlling for state (since the electoral college is what elects the President), we can add

If those polls were measuring just raw voter preference rather than controlling for state (since the electoral college is what elects the President), we can add "intentionally dishonest" to the list of problems. "Who will win the popular vote" can be a datapoint since more often than not they line up, but it is absolutely less important overall. Even if we exclude mendacity and downgrade that to mere irresponsibility, terms like "98% chance of Hillary winning" were being thrown around left and right on election day. That speaks to something very, very wrong in how that data was being collected.

learc83 8y ago
>That speaks to something very, very wrong in how that data was being collected The problem was mostly with how it was analyzed, not how it was collected. Some publications were making bad assumptions that state by state polling errors would end up being independent. 538, who didn't make that assumption, gave trump close to 1/3 chance of winning. Trump won by less than 80k votes in 3 states. Even the state polls weren't that far off--unlikely events happen.