Polling

This election was unbelievable. We had two candidate’s that seemed like choosing between a rock and a hard place. Obviously we are all entitled to our opinions in this country and we have the freedom to share them as such. When I had to do some research about the polls this election, I immediately went to Pew Research, the BBC and used FiveThirtyEight.


PEW

Pew reported some very interesting points about polling that I would have never even thought to have notice if it wasn’t for this article. The first was the massive amount of variety for people to use polling. Older ways such as telephone calls are now being paired with other modes of response. With everyone using social media and smart phones, it seems like the problem isn’t the availability of people sharing their opinion on a poll, it’s the way they’re asking for the response. On the other side, lots of people chalk up the Clinton winning the popular vote but still losing to a polling error that lead her camp astray. State polls are  much more inaccurate than national polls, historically at least. When Clinton’s campaign were reporting 70%-99% that she had the victory in the bag, they had to have made more than a few mistakes when gathering data.

FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Overestimating or underestimating how a candidate will perform on polls make a huge difference. All polls have a winning side unless it is a dead even tie which is unlikely a lot of the time. When pollster’s say that their candidate will perform one way, and are incorrect there are countless other polls that have different estimations that cancel each other out. A big thing pollster’s missed was the amount of support Donald Trump had behind him and how fed up with politician’s the population is.

BBC Poll on Election --------------->
 (Clearly showing Hillary winning)






What I would change?

If I were conducting a poll about how an election would turn out things would be a little different. I would try to minimize push polling and ask questions about important hot topic’s and then after they responded I would lay out both sides of that topic and each sides views on it. Polls are important because they give you a glimpse of what voters minds are made up about. If candidate A said something on television about candidate B, or if candidate A takes a particularly strong stance on a topic lots of voters will not wait until the end. Early voting was a big thing this year along with absentee voting.

 Analyzing Polls

 I think polls limitation’s are exactly what we saw happen in this election. You can have a strong “trend” and think you have the election won (See .Gif below). Does this mean our votes don’t matter? Obviously not, everyone who can vote can make a difference. Polls are polls for a reason, they’re estimations and should not be taken as the truth. That may be the biggest problem for people. Everyone wants to think that if the poll says it, it must be true.  But are the powers that be that put Trump in office really the late “shy trump” voters, or was there more at play here. We will never know, all we can know is we have a former television star as our President and things are pretty much ass backwards right now.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/

http://www.people-press.org/2016/11/21/low-marks-for-major-players-in-2016-election-including-the-winner/

http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37450661

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-election-polls-missed-their-mark/