How Everyone Got It So, So Wrong

Hillary Clinton was supposed to win this election — at least that’s what the polls said. But they were wrong. While Clinton may still win the popular vote (she’s currently ahead as ballots are still being counted), Donald Trump blew away expectations and secured a solid victory in the Electoral College.

Even the best estimates by pollsters for Trump’s own campaign and the Republican National Committee showed him losing, Yahoo reports.

A lot of reporters and political professionals are taking stock. Amy Walter, who writes for the Cook Political Report, wrote a great mea culpa on Wednesday analyzing why her publication (and the media in general) were so off.

"I got it wrong. Really wrong. Trump didn't just win, he crushed it. This is truly the most shocking thing that I have seen in my lifetime. … If you told me earlier this year that the electorate would be 70% white, that a Democrat would win Nevada, Colorado and Virginia, and that the Republican nominee would have had a 60 percent unfavorable rating. I would have told you that a Democrat would be president. This happened. Hillary Clinton still lost. Big time."

So how, and why, did everyone get it so wrong?

In short, journalists and pollsters saw the gigantic rallies and energy around Trump’s campaign, both on the ground and online. But they believed that the data knew better and the data told them that something very different was happening. The data was wrong.

Not everyone was wrong

As Bloomberg points out, two polling outfits actually did get it right. "The Investor’s Business Daily-TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence poll and a tally by USC Dornsife-Los Angeles Times were among the rare outfits to call the election for Trump, by 2 and 3 points," Bloomberg wrote.

Why Trump’s support was severely undercounted

The L.A. Times wrote Tuesday that their poll, one of the few winners on Election Day, asked voters whether they were likely to be honest about their preferred candidate. While Trump voters were slightly more likely to tell friends that they supported him than Clinton’s supporters were, Trump voters (particularly women) "were notably less comfortable about telling a telephone pollster [a stranger] about their vote. Voters who backed a third-party candidate were even less comfortable responding to a poll," the Times wrote.

Another theory tossed around on MSNBC Tuesday night: Trump supporters, in general, do not trust the media (yelling at reporters at campaign events became a staple of Trump’s tour of the country over the last year). So, when they got calls from media outlets doing polls, they just hung up.

Polling, in general, is increasingly and deeply flawed

As Bloomberg notes, the 2016 presidential race is just one in a series of major polling failures in around the globe. From Brexit in the U.K. to Colombia voters’ decision to reject a peace deal with the FARC rebel group to Greeks’ rejection of a bailout: the polls all got it wrong.

Part of that is to do with the way the country is changing. Polls have been slow to adapt to the dominance of cell phones over landlines, which can drastically alter who they’re able to get in touch with. And fewer people are responding to them. A Pew Research Center study showed that people who agree to answer pollsters’ questions has dropped from 43 percent in 1997 to 14 percent in 2012, Bloomberg notes.

Walter, of the Cook Political Report, gets into some of the demographic reasons why this happened: more white voters without a college degree showed up to vote than pollsters expected and they leaned heavily toward Trump, not as many women voted for Clinton as they did for Obama, etc.

But she also points out that the media were too quick to believe that because Trump was more disliked than Clinton (who was also viewed unfavorably by a huge portion of the country), that it meant that he would lose. But Walter points to the exit polls from last night’s election: Even though 60 percent of voters said they view Trump unfavorably, 15 percent of them voted for him. Sixty-three percent of voters "said they didn't think he had the ‘temperament’ to be president, he got 20% of those voters to support him. [Sixty] percent of voters said they didn't think he was qualified to be president and yet 18 percent gave him their vote."

Why? Voters in America are angry and 62 percent of them told exit pollsters last night that they feel that the country is heading in the wrong direction. "Almost 70 percent of those voters" went for Trump. Voters wanted change and, while pollsters knew that, their data convinced them that it wasn’t as important as other factors.

— Sarah Mimms
Image via FiveThirtyEight