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It been awhile since 2016 Presidential election polls which looked to indicate a Clinton victory leading up to the election day.
There one or two polls, like Rasmussen poll, who claim to be very accurate and predicted a Trump victory. However, it seem to be a majority of the polls needs to adjust there polling method. Though, there some claim 2016 were accurate, it seems to be something definitely wrong when vast majority of them predicting a +3ish for Clinton.
Which to leads to main question how useful will they be in predicting 2020 election results? Are most polls to be ignored? Should people only look at Rasmussen Poll since they seemed to have gotten 2016 right?
The 2016 polls were a farce. They were rigged and skewed to achieve the result certain people wanted to see. But the people in flyover country got the last laugh.
And forget what they show today. Joe Biden will never be the nominee. At least the polls are verifying his decline, but how accurately is another question.
It been awhile since 2016 Presidential election polls which looked to indicate a Clinton victory leading up to the election day.
There one or two polls, like Rasmussen poll, who claim to be very accurate and predicted a Trump victory. However, it seem to be a majority of the polls needs to adjust there polling method. Though, there some claim 2016 were accurate, it seems to be something definitely wrong when vast majority of them predicting a +3ish for Clinton.
Which to leads to main question how useful will they be in predicting 2020 election results? Are most polls to be ignored? Should people only look at Rasmussen Poll since they seemed to have gotten 2016 right?
One myth that the right wing has perpetuated since 2016 is that the presidential polls were inaccurate.
This isn't really correct.
Real Clear Politics poll average predicted a popular vote victory by Hillary Clinton by 3.6%. In actuality, Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%. So the polls were off less than 2% and correctly picked the popular vote winner.
Its the electoral college that makes it difficult to predict the outcome of a presidential race. Clinton would have won the election except for a margin of approximately 77,000 votes (out of millions cast) in three states: Pennsylvania; Michigan; and Wisconsin. The only way the polls could accurately predict the outcome of electoral votes is for there to be multiple good quality polls being conducted in all fifty states.
In 2018, we had further validation that polls are accurate. Real Clear Politics predicted the democratic vote would exceed the republican vote in US House of Representatives races by 7%. The actual margin the democrats got was 8% over the Republicans.
The Rasmussen was the furthest from being correct out of all polls in 2018. Averages of all polls are quite reliable though.
That's an interesting question. There's the adage that "past performance does not predict future results," and "a broken clock is right twice a day." Without dissecting the methodology of the polls and what actually happened we would be taking stabs in the dark. Clinton won the popular vote (majority of voters), but lost the electoral in areas where the poll predictors got wrong like in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other swing-blue areas.
It's possible that those areas might have been where the errant data was coming from, people polled weren't being honest, people polled didn't end up voting, or something else. At this point, I wouldn't count anything out. We still can't agree what happened even after all sorts of reports and investigations have been conducted.
Only poll that matters is the one taken on Election Day at the voting booth. I’ve learned to ignore all political polls, even ones I agree with. News media polls are made to push an agenda.
Please read the posting guidelines for this forum. The OP doesn’t establish a debate and doesn’t take a position. It’s likely there are similar topics already established at politics. Great Debates isn’t a “safe space” to chat about politics; for the type of OP here, you’ll need to enter the wilds of P&OC.
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