[Azure]

Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan

I do. Firstly the 538 numbers you cite above are projections of chance of winning, not vote share. And anyone who plays poker knows there is a WORLD of difference between a 30% chance and an 8% chance. For what it’s worth 538 gave Trump a higher chance of winning than just about anybody else (and that’s true in 2020 too).

I’ve said this before but people really need to stop saying the polls were “wrong” in 2016. With the exception of a measurable polling “error” in Wisconsin, the aggregate polling averages actually provided a very accurate picture of what happened. The “error” was pundits not catching the fact that there were very few high quality polls in certain swing states (most notably Michigan and Wisconsin) and assuming that voter preferences in those states would follow the national popular vote. As we know, that isn’t what happened.

Pollsters didn’t get 2016 wrong. Poll WATCHERS did. There are important lessons to be learned from 2016 but “don’t trust polls” just... isn’t one of them.

This is why I'm asking you. Your coverage in most of the elections in regards to polling has always been interesting. I never paid much attention in 2016; in fact I remember logging in later in the evening and seeing that Trump had won and was completely shocked. Big reason that I never paid attention was because I actually thought Clinton had it in the bag, and spent too much time listening to what media said.

Seems the bigger issue is like you said the interpretation of the polls. And how the media covers the election in general.

Why, then, had so many people who covered the campaign been so confident of Clinton’s chances? This is the question I’ve spent the past two to three months thinking about. It turns out to have some complicated answers, which is why it’s taken some time to put this article together (and this is actually the introduction to a long series of articles on this question that we’ll publish over the next few weeks). But the answers are potentially a lot more instructive for how to cover Trump’s White House and future elections than the ones you’d get by simply blaming the polls for the failure to foresee the outcome. They also suggest there are real shortcomings in how American politics are covered, including pervasive groupthink among media elites, an unhealthy obsession with the insider’s view of politics, a lack of analytical rigor, a failure to appreciate uncertainty, a sluggishness to self-correct when new evidence contradicts pre-existing beliefs, and a narrow viewpoint that lacks perspective from the longer arc of American history. Call me a curmudgeon, but I think we journalists ought to spend a few more moments thinking about these things before we endorse the cutely contrarian idea that Trump’s presidency might somehow be a good thing for the media.

To be clear, if the polls themselves have gotten too much blame, then misinterpretation and misreporting of the polls is a major part of the story. Throughout the campaign, the polls had hallmarks of high uncertainty, indicating a volatile election with large numbers of undecided voters. And at several key moments they’d also shown a close race. In the week leading up to Election Day, Clinton was only barely ahead in the states she’d need to secure 270 electoral votes. Traditional journalists, as I’ll argue in this series of articles, mostly interpreted the polls as indicating extreme confidence in Clinton’s chances, however.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...story-of-2016/