Pollsters are last night’s biggest losers

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Pre-election predictions mostly came true, except where it mattered

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race came as a shock to prognosticators and pollsters. The polling analysis blog FiveThirtyEight gave Hillary Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning in its final pre-election forecast, and the New York Times’ The Upshot put her odds of victory at 85 percent.

Some journalists this morning blamed their blown calls on bad polling.

“We don’t know what happened, because the tools that we would normally use to help us assess what happened failed,” the Times’ Maggie Haberman said. “The polling on both sides was wrong.”

But in much of the country, especially key states in the South, Southeast, and West, presidential polling was remarkably accurate:

In Colorado, the final polling average had Clinton ahead by 3 points. She won by 2 1/2 points. In Arizona, the final polls showed Trump up by 4 points. As of early this morning, with 90 percent of Arizona precincts reporting, he was winning the state by 4 points. In New Mexico and Virginia, polls predicted a comfortable win for Clinton, which came true. Pollsters predicted Clinton would win Nevada by a slight margin, and that’s exactly what happened. In Florida, polls showed that to be a dead heat. In the end, Trump won it by 1 point. Polls also showed New Hampshire too close to call, which it still was as of this morning.

So in just about every key state outside the Rust Belt, the polls were spot-on. But in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the predictions came in well off-base. Trump also won Iowa by a bigger margin than expected. And it’s those states where pollsters should focus their investigation into where they went wrong.

Almost no one saw it coming, and he did it by a slim margin, but Trump definitely knocked down the so-called blue wall in the upper Midwest and Northeast.

Listen to “White House Wednesday” on the Nov. 09, 2016, edition of The World and Everything in It.

Kent Covington

Kent is a reporter and news anchor for WORLD Radio. He spent nearly two decades in Christian and news/talk radio before joining WORLD in 2012. He resides in Atlanta, Ga.

@kentcovington