JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Tall tales about election polls.
In his presidential address a couple of years ago to the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Timothy Johnson said: “If you’re like me, seldom does a day pass when you are not obliged to correct the declaration of a friend, an acquaintance, or a university administrator that ‘the surveys got it wrong in 2016.’ This is going to be with us for a long time.”
Nationally, the polls were pretty close, in aggregate, thanks to Ms. Clinton’s wiping out Mr. Trump in California. She carried the Golden State by more than 4 million votes, a margin that erased Mr. Trump’s popular vote advantage in the rest of the country and gave Ms. Clinton an overall lead of 2.1 percentage points. According to the final pre-election compilation of Real Clear Politics in 2016, the national polls overall placed Ms. Clinton ahead by 3.3 points. So the national polls overall didn’t deviate greatly from the final result.
But there’s more to the story of the polls in 2016 than the misunderstood popular vote. In decisive states the polls clearly misfired, especially so in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and to a lesser extent Michigan. Mr. Trump defied the polls in those states and won them all narrowly. Had Ms. Clinton carried Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — as had been expected — she would have won the Electoral College and the presidency.
Anyone who takes more than passing interest in election surveys surely has heard the tale that pollsters were so confident Republican Thomas Dewey would win the presidency in 1948 that they stopped taking surveys weeks before Election Day. The blunder, it is said, caused them to miss a late surge of support for President Harry Truman.
It’s a plausible excuse for what was an epic polling failure. But it’s not entirely true.
Read the whole thing; Campbell’s new book is Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.