Ann Selzer aside, pollsters now claim they’ve done everything right

How did the pollsters get it so wrong?

If that’s what you think this morningWell, the voting gurus have news for you. They didn’t screw it up at all. You just heard them wrong.

And they have the receipts to back it up: Nate Cohn in The New York TimesFor example, he summarized his latest analysis by saying: “The polls tend to go one way or the other as a group, so a fairly decisive victory for either candidate is still possible.”

On the other hand, in the same piece he also said: “If the polling averages accurate to the decimal point (it won’t be), Ms. Harris would hardly have to outperform the polls to prevail.

Cynics will put a lot of work into the word ‘if’.

The other Nate, Nate Silver, defended himself eloquently reinstall a piece written before the election, offering 24 reasons why Trump could win (although, less confidently, he… drew his own prediction model at 10:30 PM)

Sir John Curtice, a renowned British political scientist, pollster and senior research fellow at the National Center for Social Researchrebuked the Daily Beast when we asked him to put Trump’s ‘landslide’ into context, responding via email: “It’s not a landslide (4 points lead in the popular vote).”

In a follow-up phone call, Curtice said: “It was an old-fashioned election where people voted against the incumbent government because they thought the incumbent government had messed up.

“Every poll aggregator said, ‘It’s 50/50, it’s close,’ and guess what, it was.”

Curtice pointed out that Trump’s leads in the swing states were all within the margin of error: in Georgia and North Carolina, Trump was +3 to a forecast of +1, he was predicted to tie in Pennsylvania, but he will likely + 3 finish. in Arizona he was projected to be +2 and looks like he would be +5. Harris was predicted to win Michigan and Wisconsin by margins of +1, in fact Trump had won them by +2 and +1 respectively. The numbers may push the boundaries, but they are clearly there.

Curtice added that no pollster had said anything other than that Trump could indeed win all seven swing states.

Asked to explain more generally whether polls showed why Trump had won, Curtice said: “Exit polls said 45 percent of people felt worse off now than they did under Trump. All this talk about the gender gap, black men swinging towards Trump, none of it matters except the central fact; income. The Democrats have lost ground against the less fortunate. It’s the economy, stupid.”

Constantine Boussalis, head of the Department of Political Science at Trinity University in Dublin, told the Daily Beast: “Fundamentally, opinion polls have a long history of massive failures over time, with Truman lifting the newspaper ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ held (the inaccurate early call was based on a poll).

“Every pollster tries to find the best match with the voting population in a given poll and each has their own secret sauce for achieving this, but ultimately it is a very difficult job.”

With Trump expected to collect 312 seats in the Electoral College, having crushed Harris in every competitive state from Pennsylvania to Nevada, and even all but threatening the true blue stronghold of New Jersey, it is unlikely that Democrats will be moved to compassion for the pollsters they could convincingly argue that gave the clear impression that the race would go down to the wire, with talk of coin tossing and counting continuing for days, if not weeks.

However, Zachary Greene, associate professor of politics at Strathclyde University, suggests that those shocked by the polls may have only heard what they wanted to hear: “There is a selection bias in what we are looking at. In fact, in many cases the results are quite close to what the polls showed.”

Robert Mattes, professor of government and public policy at the University of Strathclyde, and co-founder of the African Voting Instrument Afro barometer said: “It’s very difficult to vote for the Electoral College. But almost all polls underestimate Trump. That suggests there’s a systematic error somewhere in the polls — which likely means Trump voters are harder to reach and access — and that’s important because the effect is disproportionate under winner-takes-all rules.

Probably the most explicit and high-profile example of poll failure this cycle will be the Ann Selzer/Des Moines Register poll from Iowa, which showed Harris leading Iowa at 47/44. That night, Trump crushed Harris 56/42.

After the results came in, Selzer issued an almost contrite statement saying she was “thinking about how we got to where we are,” and said she would “review data from multiple sources in hopes of figuring out why that happened . And I am happy with what this process can teach me.”

For anyone looking for that rarest of things, a pollster apology, this lame excuse for the hardest word might be the most intense it can get.

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