The Polls and Predictors Were Off, But Not By as Much as It Seems
How the Polls Got It Wrong
Going into Election Day, political forecasters predicted the most likely outcome was a victorious Hillary Clinton, a Democratic Senate, and the House still firmly in Republican hands. Instead, Donald J. Trump emerged as the 45th president of the United States, while the GOP managed to hold on to both houses of Congress.
Why were these top-line forecasts ultimately so wrong? A deeper dive into the state-by-state and down-ballot predictions we’ve been tracking since the primaries shows that the failure to predict the Republican clean sweep comes down to just a few limited (though consequential) mistakes. In the presidential race, all seven forecasters we examined (including poll aggregator RealClearPolitics) incorrectly projected Clinton would win Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—collectively worth 74 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win. On the Senate side, the two universal misses were Pat Toomey's unexpected reelection in Pennsylvania, and Ron Johnson's defeat of former Senator Russ Feingold in Wisconsin.