Analysis | President Trump: How did the polls get U.S. election so wrong?
Increased turnout, voters too shy to admit voting for The Donald and the media may all be to blame
The near collective failure by political pollsters to predict Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the US presidential election is the latest in a string of high-profile mistakes by the industry, and some experts say it signals the need for urgent introspection on how data is collected, analysed and interpreted.
The Republican nominee staged unexpected victories in several marginal states including Ohio and Florida to sweep into the White House, upending most final surveys that predicted Democrat Hillary Clinton would win by a margin of between two and four percentage points.
Watch: Trump wins White House
The failure by prominent experts like Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight portal as well as international news outlets follows erroneous predictions on the outcome of Britain’s Brexit vote and Colombia’s peace deal referendum this year as well as Britain’s general election last year.
“The entire polling industry – public, campaign-associated, aggregators – ended up with data that missed tonight’s results by a large margin,” Sam Wang, a Princeton University data scientist, wrote on the polling website Princeton Election Consortium.
“There is now the question of understanding how a mature industry could have gone so wrong,” wrote Wang.