Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
Polls have increasingly fallen short of actual political outcomes. Based on recent experience in Scotland, GOP primaries, Brexit, the outlier turned out to be the reality.
I still don't think anyone in here really understands the mindset of the Trump voter.
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I do think the difference is that the 538-style model has an absolutely phenomenal record of predicting electoral college results. It's possible these sorts of models get one or two states wrong, or miss the national result by a couple points. But in the past, the tendency has been for these models to miss on states that are low-polled because of an unlikelihood to affect the national outcome (either small population or only likely to flip in the event of a landslide national victory).
Even in the primaries, the polls were generally accurate at predicting the outcomes at well-polled state-level events, with the occasional big miss like the Democrats in Michigan. The problem on the Republican side was pundits (including Nate Silver by his own admission acting like a pundit) thinking that Donald Trump was somehow an exception whose front-runner polling status wouldn't hold. There's been nothing fundamentally different about Trump voters that makes the numbers less believable.