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They were pretty indicative though. Trump only outperformed the national poll by 1-2 points and 2-3 points in the swing states. The whole 'polls are garbage' st
by rtkwe 8y ago
They were pretty indicative though. Trump only outperformed the national poll by 1-2 points and 2-3 points in the swing states. The whole 'polls are garbage' story that came out of 2016 isn't really supported by the data if you look at it.
The error has been pretty consistent forever, it's just hard to do a poll and have it line up exactly with reality because a poll is a sample in time of the thoughts of a subset that may not match who shows up. All of those factors go into why polls miss; some populations are harder to reach than others, news can come out between the poll and election day or bad weather could mess up your turnout model by keeping a lot of people home.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right...
- dragonwriter 8y ago> The whole 'polls are garbage' story that came out of 2016 isn't really supported by the data if you look at it. There were a lot of garbage poll-based predictions (the Clinton 90+% ones) based on assuming independence of polling errors. Predictions with claims of quantified likelihood based on polls are a fairly recent media phenomenon, and I think some of the legitimate reaction to how bad many of those were spilled over into polls themselves, because people don't understand that the polls weren't the source of the problem. (Which fed into existing political narratives against polling; propaganda definitely played a role but there was a real issue it interacted with.)
- rtkwe 8y agoYeah the use of the polls was the real failure in 2016. A narrative and conventional wisdom bias set in to the analysis in a lot of places that discounted close results in important states.