Your statement is an error in interpreting polls. Polls cannot tell you who will win the election, only the probability of each result. Trump has about a 30% chance of winning according to the polls.
The polls themselves were no less accurate as they have been historically, on average. They were not wrong, but have always had the limitation of only representing probabilities.
Yes, and he admitted to misleading with fake math:
> But it’s not how it worked for those skeptical forecasts about Trump’s chance of becoming the Republican nominee. Despite the lack of a model, we put his chances in percentage terms on a number of occasions.
So it would be more accurate to say that he was careful during the second half of the election, after making significant mistakes (both mathematical and ethical) during the first half.
Semantics at this point. I'll rephrase your comment with consistent terms:
If polling couldn't determine what the odds really were, the odds, which showed it was well within the realm of possibility that trump would win, aren't evidence the polls were out of alignment with reality.
The possibility of Trump winning does not exonerate the accuracy of the odds presented by polls. The odds were not correct, and the polling data was flawed.
Trump did not have a 28.6% chance of winning at all. The number was simply false because the underlying polls were fundamentally skewed in multiple states.
Yeah even the most favorable polls for Clinton gave Trump a 20% chance. The failure in the runup to the 2016 election wasn't polling, but rather most people failing to understand probability.
If the polls had said "0.1% chance", I would agree with you. But a 10% chance is actually quite high odds. Things much less likely than that happen to everyone, every day.
The predictions were essentially right. Hillary Clinton had a better chance of winning the election, but Trump successfully rolled the dice with his 10% odds: he campaigned in some critical states that were expected to go blue and won them over by a narrow majority.
You're conflating the polls with the predictive models. The polls never said Trump had a 20% chance of winning because the is not how polls work.
There where a dozen or so models which took the polls as input (some added other inputs as well) and produced a probability of a candidate winning. Some of those models where garbage (Huffington post I had Trump at ~1.5-2%) and some where pretty good (fivethirtyeight had Trump at ~30% and trending upwards). The question about how you should interpret these numbers is a more open one. What does it mean to give numeric probabilities to events which are completely unique and will only occur once (cue discussion of Bayesian vs Frequentist inference here).
Admittedly the question about if the model was right or wrong is difficult to disentangle from the question about bad polling. No model can work correctly if you feed it garbage data. The only criticism you could make is that they should have been even more critical of data they where getting from certain polls than they where.
Now as to was there something wrong with the polls? Obviously. But the interesting question is what went wrong. They where pretty good at forecasting the national popular vote, while at the same time getting certain mid-western swing states dramatically wrong. So there is obviously something in their methodology which seems to works fine when looking at the country but fails when looking at certain states.
But like you I look forward to seeing more detailed investigations coming out in the next few month.
In reading his analysis of the election here, he repeatedly mentions that having only two candidates makes things much more predictable.
In any case, we don't know if he got it "wrong" unless we know what % chance he gave this outcome. (He tries to account for the likelihood that polls are misleadingly biased, and that would correlate across multiple seats.)
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