Polling

Erick Erickson: “I got it absolutely wrong. I have been writing since February that he would not win. The great paradox of this election for me is that I never saw Mr. Trump as a legitimate contender in the primaries because I believed the polling was wrong, but it was right all along. In the general election, I presumed he would never win because the polling was right, but it was wrong all along.”

FiveThirtyEight: “The more whites without college degrees were in a state, the more Trump outperformed his FiveThirtyEight polls-only adjusted polling average,1 suggesting the polls underestimated his support with that group. And the bigger the lead we forecast for Trump, the more he outperformed his polls.2 In the average state won by Trump, the polls missed by an average of 7.4 percentage points (in either direction); in Clinton states, they missed by an average of 3.7 points. It’s typical for polls to miss in states that aren’t close, though.”

“The most important concentration of polling errors was regional: Polls understated Trump’s margin by 4 points or more in a group of Midwestern states that he was expected to mostly lose but mostly won: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.”

Vox: “The polls were quite close in their forecast for Clinton’s support. Clinton was expected to get 47 percent of the vote; she’s got 47.7 percent so far. On average, the polls understated her state-level support by about a percentage point.”

“Trump, however, was expected to get 44 percent of the vote, and he now has 47.5 percent; the polls undershot his support considerably… As the undecided made up their minds, and as third-party supporters moved toward the major party candidates (as they tend to do in a campaign’s final days), it looks like Trump picked up almost all of them.”

NBC News: “The polls were wrong — all of them. So were the experts, the political consultants and the seasoned officials in both parties who predicted Donald Trump would lead his party to ruin. So were the markets, which had anticipated a Hillary Clinton victory and crashed overnight as her electoral firewall caught ablaze. So was every living president and past presidential nominee of both parties, save Bob Dole, all of whom opposed Trump. So was this reporter and so many like him — and Trump told me as much.”

“Even the GOP polling numbers and analytics we were privy to didn’t show Trump winning. The biggest mistake we made was viewing what seemed to be a very stable race in the polls (with Clinton holding a durable lead), but what ultimately turned into anything but.”

Jake Tapper, on CNN:  “It’s going to put the polling industry out of business. It’s going to put the voter projection industry out of business.”

Our intense focus on election forecasting models over the last few months seems entirely misplaced when this can happen in a single night.

Nate Silver: “Seven of the 19 polls have Clinton leading by 4 points; another four have her ahead by 3 points… It’s worth raising an eyebrow, though, when the polls (other than the L.A. Times) show a range this tight at the end of an election, especially given that they’d diverged so much earlier in the campaign. That probably reflects some degree of herding — for instance, because pollsters stick surveys that seem to be outliers in a file drawer rather than publishing them. So the tight range of polls shouldn’t be taken to mean that everyone’s figured exactly how to poll this challenging election just in the nick of time.”

“Still, the polls clearly agree that Clinton is the favorite, and perhaps has a slight wind at her back for Election Day.”

Huffington Post: “The short version is that Nate is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.”

“Silver calls this unskewing a ‘trend line adjustment.’ He compares a poll to previous polls conducted by the same polling firm, makes a series of assumptions, runs a regression analysis, and gets a new poll number. That’s the number he sticks in his model ― not the original number.”

“He may end up being right, but he’s just guessing. A ‘trend line adjustment’ is merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling.”

“One reason there’s so much uncertainty in the race so close to Election Day is the sharp decline in high-quality polls this year,” Politico reports.

“FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver calculated the number of polls in competitive states released from Thursday evening through the day on Friday. In all, Silver counted 67 polls across 17 states.”

“That seems like a robust number, but of the 67 polls, only 5 were conducted by live telephone interviewers randomly calling voters on landlines and cell phones — still considered by many to be the most reliable form of polling.”

Harry Enten: “Even at the end of a presidential campaign, polls don’t perfectly predict the final margin in the election. Sometimes the final polls are quite accurate. An average of national polls in the week before the 2008 election had Barack Obama winning by 7.6 percentage points. He won by 7.3 points. Sometimes, however, the polls miss by more. Four years ago, an average of survey results the week before the election had Obama winning by 1.2 percentage points. He actually beat Mitt Romney by 3.9 points.”

“If that 2.7-point error doesn’t sound like very much to you, well, it’s very close to what Donald Trump needs to overtake Hillary Clinton in the popular vote. She leads by 3.3 points in our polls-only forecast.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign described the ABC News-Washington Post tracking poll that showed Donald Trump ahead as “bad polling,” according to Politico.

Said a senior Clinton aide: “Sorry. It’s just not what we see at all; it’s not what other people seem to have. There just seems to be something about that model that seems off.”

The YouGov Election Model allows you segment voters by demographics, such as age, gender, race and education.