The idea of so-called “shy Trumpers” suggests that support for Trump was socially undesirable, and that his supporters were unwilling to admit their support to pollsters. Some have also suggested that many of those who were polled simply were not honest about whom they intended to vote for. The result would be a strongly pro-Trump segment of the population that simply did not show up in the polls in proportion to their actual share of the population. It is possible that the frustration and anti-institutional feelings that drove the Trump campaign may also have aligned with an unwillingness to respond to polls. We know that some groups – including the less educated voters who were a key demographic for Trump on Election Day – are consistently hard for pollsters to reach. This occurs when certain kinds of people systematically do not respond to surveys despite equal opportunity outreach to all parts of the electorate. One likely culprit is what pollsters refer to as nonresponse bias. ![]() There are, however, several possible explanations for the misstep that many in the polling community will be talking about in upcoming weeks. Pollsters don’t have a clear diagnosis yet for the misfires, and it will likely be some time before we know for sure what happened. The traditional telephone polls of recent decades are now joined by increasing numbers of high profile, online probability and nonprobability sample surveys, as well as prediction markets, all of which showed similar errors. The fact that so many forecasts were off-target was particularly notable given the increasingly wide variety of methodologies being tested and reported via the mainstream media and other channels. State-level polling was more variable, but there were few instances where polls overstated Trump’s support. With few exceptions, the final round of public polling showed Clinton with a lead of 1 to 7 percentage points in the national popular vote. There is a great deal of speculation but no clear answers as to the cause of the disconnect, but there is one point of agreement: Across the board, polls underestimated Trump’s level of support. How could the polls have been so wrong about the state of the election? Relying largely on opinion polls, election forecasters put Clinton’s chance of winning at anywhere from 70% to as high as 99%, and pegged her as the heavy favorite to win a number of states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that in the end were taken by Trump. The results of Tuesday’s presidential election came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling, which consistently projected Hillary Clinton as defeating Donald Trump. (Photo by Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images) presidential election at Comet Tavern in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle on Nov. Supporters of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton watch televised coverage of the U.S.
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