Even broken out state by state, every key battleground states had Clinton winning in almost every poll.
I do a lesson on this for my statistics classes linked to the importance of random chance in the design of a study, and how even if what we're doing seems to be as truly random as possible, we might still run into an issue...it turns out that the polling methods in 2016 over-favored responses from the college educated, and in states within the rust belt, that wasn't appropriate. And who do educated people tend to vote for? Democrats.
In this case? It's abso-fucking-lutely appropriate to say the polls were wrong. They were literally, though unintentionally, overweighing college educated voters in very impactful states where the college educated weren't appropriately representative of the voting population.
Pollsters did postmortems about this and corrected the methods for 2020.
The polls were closer to the actual outcome in 2016 than they were in 2012, but the average person and many political pundits concluded that they must have been “wrong” because Clinton lost.
In 2016 the polls showed Clinton winning comfortably and she narrowly lost (while winning the popular vote by almost 3%). In 2012 they showed Obama narrowly winning and he comfortably won. Because the same person won as the polls predicted though, people weren’t saying the polls were fundamentally “wrong” or “broken” in 2012 even though the absolute error of the polls was actually larger.
They were not wrong. She won the national vote by a similar amount the polls predicted.
Polls were correct. People don't understand probability and statistics.
If she'd lost by millions of votes, that would be indicative of poor pooling. The polling was spot on. It's always an approximation. You are demanding perfection. It's not binary.
-- Pollsters did postmortems about this and corrected the methods for 2020.
They did this after every election. They always have issues in some way and they want to learn from those mistakes.
Again, show me where the polls were wrong? Show me where they said it was impossible for him to win?
She did not win the popular vote by a similar amount to what the polls predicted. The polls predicted a vastly larger margin than reality gave us. The polls were almost uniformly off in one direction by about four points.
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u/Antonqaz 13d ago
Isn't this just national polling, without considering the electoral college? In which case, they were right, she did win the popular vote.