The Polls Really Weren't That Far Off

[louis c]

The final polls had Hillary with about a 2 to 3 point lead in the national popular vote. the final result will probably be off less than a point from that number.

The 1% was just such strategically placed as to swing just enough electoral college votes as to hand Donald Trump the Presidency.

How can a Democracy hand three branches of government and give unanimous rule to a political party that lost all three legislative and executive branches. The cumulative vote total in the Senate demonstrates a Democratic win. The Presidency was a plurality of a million and a half votes. Yet, we are now shut out of government.

In 2012, the cumulative House vote favored Democrats, yet we lost by 35 seats

Link;
http://bigthink.com/politeia/how-republicans-lost-the-vote-and-won-the-house

Majority rules? This type of systematic result will undoubtedly lead to a problem.

Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/10/democrats-won-popular-vote-senate-too/93598998/

[libtodeath]

1. Our election system is fucked up.

We should have a parliamentary government with representation reflecting the popular vote.

[Coyotl]

2. Exit polls were only off by 4-8% - "Realluy Weren't That Far Off" - LOL

When the battleground state exit polls are off a consistent 5% and almost every state is a red shift, up to 12%, I'd alter that OP title to say just the opposite.

[Blanks]

3. Very suspicious. eom

[Hoyt]

5. I think a lot of Trump voters lied about. At least they were ashamed and not proud of it.

[lonestarnot]

6. I think you have been hoodwinked. Yeah trumpers are liars, but you leave out the Russians.

[Hoyt]

7. Just not going to spend 4 years whining about some trumped up conspiracy.

[lonestarnot]

8. Then don't whine. But don't hide from the facts either.

[Hoyt]

9. What facts?

[Coyotl]

12. Exit polls show 5-8% red shift in key swing states with narrow Trump wins.

Without even considering how 100K voters changing their minds would have altered the outcome, with so few deciding so much the implications include how voter suppression and ID laws change which party governs.

[lonestarnot]

20. Vote hack. FBI partisan hack went public too.

[Coyotl]

10. Lie on a secret ballot?

Yeah, if that helps you sleep at night, go with it. So, did they lie about their sex and color too?

Exit polls are taken a few minutes after voting and the respondent fills a question sheet in secret, in a private voting situation. The statistics reveal which votes and other answers are associated person by person, but you never know which ballot attaches to which voter specifically. The pollster only knows which precinct the ballot attaches to.

Why would the few liars not be normally distributed anyway? Facile assumptions are still assumptions.

Wish we all had access to the full database of unigue ballots and their associated responses by precinct.

[Hoyt]

11. If a conspiracy theory makes you feel better . . . . . Fact is, if Trump had lost, we'd be hearing

the same junk from them.

Exit polls are also conducted by interviews, and lots of people refuse to take them -- interview or questionnaire -- like those ashamed of what they have just done. But, why ruin a good conspiracy and 4 years of grousing that won't do us a bit of good in 2018 or 2020.

[Coyotl]

13. It is not a conspiracy theory, it is facts contradicting what the OP said.

The OP says the polls were good. The average polls match the exit polls, not the vote results. Those are facts that you can't dismiss by labeling them a conspiracy.



Mathematics is not something that shifts for politics, it is just data, not interpretations. Math can have political implications and exit polling tests election integrity.

Make your own inferences, and don't make mine for me.

[Hoyt]

15. Mathematics or Garbage in . . . . . .

[lonestarnot]

21. It wasn't the fucking democrats that cozied up to Pootie Fruitie. It was apparently your candidate.

[Hoyt]

22. Not my candidate. I just accept my candidate didn't lose because of the conspiracies

being advanced by some.

[lonestarnot]

23. The same complacency that got us hacked.

[Hoyt]

25. Or the same conspiracies that make us look stupid and not face reality if we want to

prevail in 2018 and 2020.

[lonestarnot]

26. If truly investigated, you may eat your words.

[Hoyt]

29. I well might. But until then, your theories might not be valid, and aren't doing us

any good.

[uponit7771]

35. Of course we'd be hearing it from them with no facts to back it up, they're fact-less as a culture

... and it doesn't matter who that culture raps around

[politicaljunkie41910]

18. Who would go through the trouble of lying to an anonymous pollster?

Besides, Trumpers were proud of the fact that they were backing Trump at his rallies and anytime they got a chance to express their support for him in front of a camera. Now they want us to believe, after the numbers don't add up, that Trump supporters were closet supporters who were afraid to say so publicly. I say that's bullhockey.

[Hoyt]

24. Trump won in some prescints near me, but I only saw a couple of signs or stickers.

I wouldn't admit to being an ignorant rabid dog to pollsters.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

31. C'mon....

60+ Mil people voted for Trump... how many "proudly" attended his rallies? Maybe a million.

Many people, particularly older people who remember when there was such a thing as personal privacy, don't believe their vote is anyone's business but their own. They don't respond to pollsters at any time.

Every election, and every candidate, has 'closet supporters' however, no one pays attention to those of the losing side.

I suspect many of those closet Trump supporters have been enjoying the hell out of the shock their votes contributed to creating.

[politicaljunkie41910]

33. Your speculative response is no better than mine. Your entire response assumes things as fact

which are just your opinion and no better than my opinion questioning the validity of the argument that the pools were wrong because of millions of closet Trump supporters who secretly decided on their own to lie to pollsters during the campaign and during exit polling to purposely screw up results. As one who has been polled several times over the years and thinking it would go quickly only to have the pollster ask many more questions than anticipated, I don't think anyone who valued their personal privacy would ever have subjected themselves to the process. So I don't buy into the theory that enough closet Trump supporters, acting independently, lied to pollsters to conceal the fact that they were voting for Trump. Though I'm willing to accept the fact that I could be wrong, I doubt it, as exit polling historically has been extremely accurate.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

34. I merely pointed out

that you could not speak for 60 Mil voters by saying they proudly supported Trump. You then made my argument by saying:

"...I don't think anyone who valued their personal privacy would ever have subjected themselves to the process."

They don't respond to pollsters, not exit pollsters or telephone posters and many refuse to even participate in an anonymous online poll.

What I find the most interesting about the failure of this year's polling to predict the winner is that it failed so miserably in the one thing for which political polling is truly intended...propaganda. I also think it interesting that Romney & his supporters had too little faith in the polls and HRC & her supporters had too much faith in them. In a perfect world there would be no such polls for 6 months prior to an election. I can't help but wonder how many Dems skipped the election because they believed Hillary couldn't lose.

[Tiggeroshii]

19. Oregon is all mail voting...

What can you say about the deviation?

[LeftInTX]

14. The key state polls were off

I think state polls are more difficult than national polls. They don't have tracking polls like the national polls. There is an overwhelming amount of national polls as compared to state polls. On Nov 7th, there were 21 national polls. There were only 4 Florida polls, 1 Ohio poll, 3 NC, 3 VA, 1 PA, 3 MI and 3 NV. Ideally, there should have been 21 polls in each state. In the end, national polls don't really count.

There are all sorts of theories out there. I read them when DU was knocked out. In general pollsters have difficulty identifying likely voters. Polls are becoming more expensive. People don't want to answer phones etc.
Here is a generalized article: http://www.econotimes.com/What-will-pollsters-do-after-2016-409827

There was Comey's late October surprise which didn't show up in state polls. Exit polls showed some people made up their minds in the last week.

Then there was the Traflagar Group which seemed to be an outlier and showed Trump wins in the swing states.

But here is what they did:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-2016-polls-upset-214461
And so, we started from that, back in the primary to create a model of what this Trump voter looks like, which is not a new voter, but a lapsed voter. We broke them up into people who had voted in the 2008 presidential election forward, and people who voted in 2006 or earlier and had not participated forward.

And so, we took that universe of those who have participated in 2006 or previous—we’re talking about people who voted for the last time in the ‘70s, in the ‘80s, in the ‘90s, and earlier 2000s, and we created the term Trump surge voters, and we added them into our call database as well as the newly registered, because in our experience, when people register to vote for the first time, the election that follows is the one that they’re most likely to participate in. So we had a good mix of newly registered voters as well as what we call our Trump surge voters. So, we started by basically having a different type to make our soup from, and we put all those in there.

I don't know how conventional Traflagar's methodology is....

The polls were wrong.

[Hoyt]

16. That's my feeling, the polls were wrong. Why? is another matter.

[uponit7771]

36. The more important thing right now is the pollsters haven't indicated what went wrong...

... if they want any credibility in the future they better speak up now.

My thought is they know what's up, there's something not right about the voting tallies in the rural areas

[Coyotl]

17. There were lots of state polls, with high respondent numbers too in key states.

http://www.270towin.com/2016-senate-election-results-live/

How did you miss them?

Plus, the number of respondents in the four battleground state exit polls alone is 13,502. Use the link above to visit all the polls and count/compare them. Note how many more respondents there are in key states.

Exit polls are not comparable to pre-election pooling, they are more accurate (supposedly, but not this time). There is no assumption a person will actually vote, they poll those who have voted.

[Buzz Clik]

28. Yep.

[Buzz Clik]

27. The national popular vote doesn't determine the president.

The state votes were way off in about six crucial states. Way off -- the polls favoring Clinton, the vote favoring Trump.

[spin]

30. I feel far too many Hillary supporters felt that the media was correct...

and even if Trump managed to win a good number of electoral votes he would still be unable to reach 270. All the talking heads on TV and the experts were saying that Trump had absolutely no path to win the electoral college. If they lived in states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio they felt Hillary would easily win so why make the effort and waster their time to stand in a long line to vote.

Trump supporters were not discouraged by the polls and understood that in order for Trump to win his supporters had to turn out and vote. They simply were more enthusiastic about this election and Trump than Hillary supporters. Many simply refused to accept the media analysis of how the election would turn out as Trump supporters distrust the media to begin with. If the Trump supporters lived in a swing state they realized how important every vote could be after the Bush v Gore election in Florida.

If we had a redo election you can bet Hillary would win the electoral college.

This election should teach many an important lesson. If you want your candidate to win you should show up at the polls and vote.

I voted but I hate to stand in long lines so I have been voting using an absentee ballot for at least sixteen years. If you can in your state it is woth considering. I also like the fact that I have plenty of time to research the candidates and the issues while I have the ballot in front of me. I don't have to make a list of the candidates and issues I wish to vote for and carry it with me to the polling place. It's a pain when you get the ballot and walk in the voting booth and realize you let your list behind.

In passing my personal opinion is that if you didn't care enough to vote than you should realize you have lost the right to bitch about the results.

I do like bitching so I vote.

[Locut0s]

32. If I had to guess and sum up the result in one word. Gerrymandering? nt.