Biggest Presidential Polling Error

[cthulu2016]

This is a surprise... the election the polls blew worst was Clinton vs. Dole.

Dole outperformed his late polling on election day more so than Truman vs. Dewey or Reagan vs. Carter.

The difference is that Clinton was expected to win huge and merely won big so the polling discrepancy wasn't a big deal, except among pollsters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1996#Polling_controversy

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Speaking of historical polls, it is always interesting to revisit 1980.

[unblock]

1. sigh. people forget carter almost won. imagine how different america would be had reagan lost!

volker would have done his thing regardless (he was a carter appointee, after all) and so inflation would gotten under control but democrats would have gotten the credit.

and very likely the economy would have taken off thereafter regardless. right-wingers will insiste that reagan's tax cuts were 100% responsible, but that's silly, particularly because he hiked taxes afterward (especially payroll taxes). the explosive deficit had more to do with it, and it's true that a deficit in carter's second term would have been smaller, so perhaps the economy might not have gotten the keynesian push it did under reagan -- though we likely would still have had a nice recovery and expansion.

in any event, we would have been spared the social and political and economic damage wrought by a man who made greed and contempt fashionable.