Joy Xie ’18
Throughout the 2016 election, Americans saw polls forecasting Hillary Clinton as the most likely winner as early as the primaries. From FiveThirtyEight to The New York Times, many polls showed that Hillary Clinton had a definite lead anywhere from 70 percent to 99 percent, according to the The Atlantic–making Trump’s win even more shocking than it already was. Most analysts still aren’t sure why the polls were so off, but there are some speculations.
In recent years there has been a larger discrepancy between the popular vote and electoral votes. Thus, even now Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump earned more electoral votes. The reason is that a huge portion of the population is concentrated in a few states along the East and West coast, so the electoral votes in the middle of the country are not as represented in the popular votes.
Similarly, the state polls also had numerous issues. Before the prevalence of cell phones, pollsters used to call landline phones, getting a wide variety of samples. With the recent explosion of technology, the surveys have become more biased because it is usually the same types of opinionated people who are willing to answer polls. Most of the time, the less educated and rural voters–who were key demographics for Trump–were much harder to reach because they were anti-institution, and they thought the polls represented the establishment.
However, one of the biggest hypotheses for the inaccuracy of the polls is the notion of “shy Trump” voters who felt that supporting Trump publicly was socially undesirable. Yet though the concept was slightly true for higher income and more educated voters, it made no real impact overall as shown by Politico.
In any case, polls are supposed to be objective and a good way to represent the population. Thus, with this massive miscast, the polls must gain their credibility back and show that they can still represent the people.
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