Why Were Hillary Clinton's Election Losses Not Predicted by the Polls?

Polling Accuracy and the Unexpected Election Results

The_office_poll_results_undershot_Hillary_Clinton's_victory_in_2016._Despite_predictions_from_premitted_surveys_indicating_a_close_race_in_key_swing_states, Clinton ultimately lost. This was a surprising outcome that many attributed to the polls being inaccurate. Let's dive into the reasons behind this misprediction.

The Issues with Polling

The problems with polling have intensified over the past two decades. One of the major contributors to these inaccuracies is the widespread use of cell phones. Traditional landline phones provided a more reliable geographical polling profile, allowing for breakdowns by area codes and exchanges. Today, cell phones have introduced several challenges that impact polling accuracy.

Geographical Challenges with Cell Phones

A significant issue with cell phones is the ability to retain the same phone number while changing locations or carriers. This leads to two critical problems:

Reliable Geographic Polls: Traditional landline phone polls could accurately track where voters lived based on geographic data. With cell phones, the accuracy of these geographic polls has diminished, making them less reliable.

Meaningless Area Codes: Area codes do not accurately reflect the geographic location of a cell phone user. For instance, having a single cell phone number with multiple area codes (e.g., 612 for business and 651 for personal use) makes it difficult to determine the user's actual location. This makes regional analysis less precise.

Technological Challenges with Cell Phones

Another challenge is the advent of voicemail and blocking technologies, which have adversely affected the ability of pollsters to contact respondents:

Massive Text Spam: For example, a single number was purchased by the Nikki Haley campaign, leading to nearly 100 spam texts. Most of these texts were automatically marked as spam by the users and relegated to the spam folder.

Voicemail Blocking: Personalized voicemail settings allow users to block unknown callers, reducing the number of effective responses from potential respondents.

The combination of these technological and logistical challenges made it difficult for pollsters to achieve accurate results, leading to mispredictions.

Strategic and Human Factors Contributing to Misreporting

Beyond technological challenges, there were also strategic and human factors that contributed to the misreporting of polling results:

Lying

Hillary Clinton faced unprecedented levels of media scrutiny and hate, leading to a phenomenon known as "lying to pollsters." Many voters felt pressured to lie about their true preferences to avoid backlash or to protect themselves from potential consequences:

Selective Reporting: By focusing on certain demographic groups, pollsters sometimes presented skewed results that favored one candidate. These groups were selected based on factors such as age, location, profession, and income, which can influence voting patterns. However, these methods failed to account for the lies and misreporting that were common among voters who changed their answers at the polls.

Exit Poll Bias and Misleading Data

Exit polls, which are intended to capture the actual voting behavior, also exhibited inaccuracies. Many voters who expressed support for Clinton at the polls later admitted to having lied to pollsters. As a result, the exit polls showed a high percentage of Clinton supporters, but the actual election results revealed a different story:

Undecided Voters: The sudden shift of undecided voters towards Trump, especially in swing states, played a critical role in the election result.

Overall, the mispredictions in the 2016 election were a result of a combination of technological, strategic, and human factors. Polls, although valuable tools, have limitations that need to be acknowledged and addressed in future elections.