What went wrong in this year’s presidential polls?
EMILY SWANSON, Associated Press
THOMAS BEAUMONT, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s victory came as a surprise to many Americans, the nation’s pollsters most of all.
Heading into Election Day, most national surveys overstated what will likely be a narrow popular vote advantage for Hillary Clinton and led many to believe she was a shoo-in to win the Electoral College.
“The polls clearly got it wrong this time,” the American Association for Public Opinion Research said Wednesday in a statement. The association traditionally assesses the state of public polling after each election cycle, and already has a committee in place to do so again this year.
“I think it was an important polling miss. It would really be glossing over it to say that it was a typical year,” said Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center.
For now, it’s impossible to know for certain what exactly went wrong for pollsters this year — and, as votes are still being counted, exactly how far off they were. Some factors pollsters will examine:
___
HOW BIG A MISS?
Although most polls throughout the 2016 campaign showed Clinton running ahead of Trump, in the final two weeks of the campaign her advantage narrowed in many national surveys, as well as in states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. Her apparent lead fell within many surveys’ margins of sampling error.
Kennedy said pollsters may ultimately not have had a historically large miss on the national popular vote, but thinks there was a systematic overrepresentation of Clinton’s support and underrepresentation for Trump’s.
She says people sometimes expect too much of election polls, which “are not designed to provide extremely accurate results.”
Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, says that averages of publicly available polls sometimes give a false sense of certainty in a candidate’s lead.
“You’re taking imprecise estimates and throwing them all together with the hope of eliminating error,” he says.
___
SHY TRUMP VOTERS?
Trump’s campaign frequently pointed to the possibility that public polls were missing some of his base of support, and some pollsters say that might have played a role in the polling miss.
“One of the biggest problems that polls face nowadays is that people don’t want to participate in them at all,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. He plans to use voter data to find out if certain types of people were less likely to participate in his surveys.
At Pew, Kennedy said it appears that there was a segment of Trump’s support base that was not responding to polls, which she called “fundamentally a difficult challenge to fight.” But, she said, it’s unlikely voters were lying about their support.
___
TURNOUT
Harold Clarke, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas who regularly conducts polling, said one of the shortfalls in the presidential prediction was a problem that has plagued survey science for decades.
“We’ve got to filter our surveys as we try to pick out those people that are really going to vote,” he said. “We all have the problem of not getting likely voters right.”
Murray said pollsters are using likely voter models that might have worked in the past, but may no longer. He suggested that public pollsters should take a lesson from campaigns and consider putting out a range of numbers reflecting different turnout scenarios instead of a single number that suggests too much certainty in where the horse race stands.
___
TIGHTENING RACE
Republican pollster Whit Ayres suggests that many observers — himself included — assumed that since Trump had never held a lead, he wouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt from voters in the end. But he says that in races where an incumbent is stuck below 50 percent in the polls, late deciders often break toward the challenger.
“There were a number of us who should have raised that possibility before the election,” Ayres said. “If you think about it, Hillary Clinton is about as close as you can get to an incumbent.”
Nationally and in key states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Trump prevailed among voters who said they decided which candidate to support in the last week before voting, according to exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and television networks by Edison Research.
In retrospect, Republican pollster Ed Goeas says that he saw a sign he now believes was a clue of Trump’s advantage. In his national polling, he saw an 8 percentage point edge for Trump in voter intensity and enthusiasm among his supporters.
“But the assumption on our part was that Clinton’s ground game would overcome or neutralize that intensity,” Goeas said. “It just didn’t.”
___
NOT ENOUGH POLLS?
In several key states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, there were few polls conducted in the final week before the election.
“In some of those unexpected states in the Rust Belt — Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin — you didn’t see some of the more rigorous polls being conducted,” said Kennedy.
Goeas confesses to failing to see some late movements, in part because his polling ended four days before the election.
“So basically we were looking at numbers thinking where he might end up,” Goeas said of Trump’s chances in Wisconsin, where he believed the Republican would benefit from Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s get-out-the-vote operation. “Did we have any comfort he would do it? No.”
“It would have been nice to have a couple more Michigan and Wisconsin polls to adjust that perception” that Clinton was leading, Miringoff said. “The campaigns don’t stop because the pollsters do their final poll.”
___
Associated Press writer Matt Sedensky contributed to this report.
[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]
The following excerpt from an article by By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman / The Progressive, explains more completely the process that allowed Donald Trump to win.
Donald Trump will join Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and George W. Bush as presidents who lost the popular vote but still took the nation’s highest office, in every case with huge impacts.
The Electoral College was established at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to prevent the public from voting directly on our national leader. Ostensibly, it was meant in part to protect small states from being bullied by bigger ones.
It also installed a “three-fifth bonus” that gave plantation owners a 60 percent headcount for their slaves. The ruse was counted into Congressional districting, giving the south a distinct advantage over the northern free states. That’s why every President from Jefferson to Lincoln either owned slaves or had a vice president who did.
In 1800, Jefferson beat the incumbent John Adams in an Electoral College swung by “bonus votes” that came from slaves who could not actually cast them. In 1824, John Quincy Adams made a deal with Kentucky slaveowner Henry Clay to steal the presidency from Andrew Jackson, who had beaten Adams by about 50,000 popular votes.
In 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes lost to Democrat Samuel Tilden by about 250,000 votes. But the GOP used federal troops in the south to shift enough Electoral College votes to create a deadlock. Hayes then became president by agreeing to remove those troops and end Reconstruction, a catastrophe for southern blacks and a triumph for the Jim Crow segregation that has defined our national politics ever since.
In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote to incumbent Democrat Grover Cleveland but became president anyway. Cleveland won back the White House in 1892.
In 2000, Democrat Al Gore beat Republican George W. Bush by a nationwide tally of about 500,000 votes. Gore was also ultimately shown to have won the popular vote in Florida. But Bush’s brother Jeb, then governor of Florida, used a computerized system to remove voters from the rolls, to steal Florida’s electoral votes and put George in the White House.
Much the same was done in Ohio 2004 to defeat John Kerry. Bush ultimately was credited with a victory in the nationwide popular vote.
This year, Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory will change history in unimaginable ways. But nationwide it appears he did not win the popular vote. Hillary Clinton did.
Trump did more than insinuate that the press and polling data are rigged. How can we expect a jaded electorate to honestly participate in polls, given how people feel about the ‘establishment.’
The only poll needed and the only one that counts is on voting day. All else is backseat manipulation and air filling time…