This is why you simply cannot believe anything they say. The final polls and estimates prior to the election.
- The New York Times: 80 percent chance of Clinton victory
- Huffington Post: 98.1 percent chance of Clinton victory
- Nate Silver/538: 72 percent chance of Clinton victory (323 electoral votes)
- Bing.com: 89.7 percent chance of Clinton victory
- NBC/SM: Clinton +6
- IPSOS: Clinton +4
- Fox News: Clinton +4
- NBC/WSJ: Clinton +4
- ABC/WashPost: Clinton +4
- Herald: Clinton +4
- Bloomberg: Clinton +3
But this is what demonstrates how SHAMELESSLY dishonest they are:
Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States.
In an extremely narrow sense, I’m not that surprised by the outcome, since polling — to a greater extent than the conventional wisdom acknowledged — had shown a fairly competitive race with critical weaknesses for Clinton in the Electoral College. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that Clinton will eventually win the popular vote as more votes come in from California.
– Nate Silver
Oh, shut up, Nate. You were wrong. You were wrong from the start. You were wrong about the primaries. You were wrong about the election. No one should put any faith in your erroneous models ever again.
Keep in mind that Silver not only called a 72 percent chance of a Clinton victory, but actually INCREASED it from 65 percent on the day of the election. This isn’t “statistical science”; it’s not even “statistical analysis”. It is nothing more than postmortem media CYA.
dh, our resident statistical expert, will likely see it the same way. Last night, he wrote:
I would conclude so far:
1. There is a such thing as a reluctant Trump supporter, who was missed by the vast of polls, and was undercounted by as much as 4-5% in some states (and maybe nationally, we’ll see on that).
2. There is no such thing as NeverTrump, the party advantage numbers are exactly where they always have been (prelim but looks solid) – 90/10 party advantage to each candidate.
3. Trump out-campaigned Clinton vastly, and it has really shown. The crowd intensity and star power and magnetism he brought out has apparently paid off in ways that I did not correctly anticipate.
I am sure the numbers will continue to firm up, but at 11EST that’s how it looks. If the polling comes out as bad as it looks right now, the entire industry may be upended from the roots and shaken out.
The entire polling industry needs to be upended. In the light of the next day, it is readily apparent that the polling actually came out worse than it looked last night. The debate between dh and I was never personal, it was a conceptual battle of predictive analytical models.
And it is now very clear that the old media models are now outmoded. This should not be a surprise, considering that the shift from ideology politics to identity politics is only beginning. The transformation from liberal vs conservative to non-white vs white is now underway, but it is far from complete.