Polls

Looking in depth to the polling numbers is something that I have never done for any election while I have been alive. So why wouldn’t the first election polling I look into be one of the most divisive in history. Every poll one looked at had Hillary Clinton winning, it seemed like an almost guarantee that she would become the first woman President of the United States. While expectations were high for a monumental day in history, no one was paying attention to the undecided voters that were being overlooked by the organizations that were doing the polling.

As you can see from the chart above, Clintons margin was way over calculated while now President Trumps was way under calculated. While this exit poll may be a little bias considering it was taken from CNN, it is still shocking of how off they were on the margins of victories for certain states. That goes for some of the states that Hillary Clinton won and some of the states that Donald Trump won. Taken from fivethirtyeight.com “The cacophony of headlines about how “CLINTON LEADS IN POLL” neglected the fact that these leads were often quite small and that if one poll missed, the others potentially would also. As I pointed out on Wednesday, if Clinton had done only 2 percentage points better across the board, she would have received 307 electoral votes and the polls would have “called” 49 of 50 states correctly”. This is a staggering statistic the article gives us to show just how tight knit this race was. It seemed set in stone that Hillary Clinton would win by a landslide when no one was paying attention to the small percentage points she was winning in plenty of states.

Young voters is not where Hillary missed her mark in the polls as seen from the bar graph above. She failed to look further into the other voters that she was missing, the older white generation that arguably won the election for Trump.

After having learned more about polling in the past week or two, it is no easy task to get accurate polling statistics. In the most recent case involving Trump and Clinton it came down to the polls forgetting about the undecided voters in some states that led to the shift in momentum towards Trump and an eventual win. I would start by asking people what they wanted to see in a candidate. As basic of a question as it is, you can delve deeper into what that person sees in the two candidates along with whether they might be swayed one way or another. Getting into too many specifics of what types of questions you would ask is hard considering that I would ask questions based around a person’s voting history and what they want out of a presidential candidate.

Polling is key to our political nature of today. Everyone wants to be aware of what is going on around them and needs immediacy in this day and age. That doesn’t go for every American but a majority wants to be updated as quickly as possible of what lies ahead for the political world. Polling lets us get an image of where we are as a country, what types of people are located where and why they vote for the candidates they do. Some choices for a certain demographic are obvious while others are harder to see.