Did news media make up their poll results about election?

I don't feel like we ever got a straight answer from the media about why their poll results were so wrong about who would win the election. Some claimed it was due to them polling the wrong people, but why did fox news (pro trump) polls also show Hillary winning by a large margin? It makes me wonder if they were just making up the results. What do you think?

 

They certainly just didn't make up the results. The results were gathered by reputable pollsters who base their reputation (and fees) on their accuracy.

I think that the results were skewed because people lie to pollsters. The MSM were excoriating Trump so much people were reluctant to tell the pollsters the truth. The polls were also wrong on Brexit. The secret ballot is a huge thorn in the side of liberals.

 

It's because today's liberals can't have a debate anymore. If a liberal disagrees with you your just labeled a racist, or islamaphobe, or xenophobe, etc.. most people don't want to deal with the being labeled, so they just lie to the pollsters

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Because Trump was right.
There was massive voter fraud in this election.
All you have to do is change a few voting districts in a few states to change the electoral college outcome.
And the person the the polls say will win, loses.
A swing of 75,000 votes in just 3 states and every poll would be correct.
Clinton wins popular vote by over 2.5 million and wins the electoral college by 273 to 258.
And nobody would think anything about the polls.

I would really like to see an investigation into voter fraud in the Blue wall of states Clinton supposedly had.
Did she really lose them? We now know the Russians were actively working to affect the outcome of the election.
Just how far did they go?

 

No President has ever got 50% of the nation's population to vote for him. If that's the bar for a mandate as indicated in your sig then nobody has ever had one.

I think it's important we base our opinions on election rigging on hard evidence. To my knowledge absolutely nobody anywhere is accusing Russia of hacking ballots or compromising machines. Just that they made certain facts available to the voter which caused that voter to vote for Trump.

The popular vote is as relevant as the potato vote. It has no constitutional meaning at all. Nor is this something unique to the US, as I have been pointing out since Nov 9. For instance, Bob Hawke lost the 1990 Australian Federal election, his opponent got 50.10% of the vote. Yet he still won the election because his party won a majority of seats in Parliament.

Parliament is the electoral college in majoritarian political systems such as Australia, the UK, Canada, etc. But in the US you have a strong separation of the legislative and executive branches, so Congress does not select the President, a mirror of it does: the electoral college. This achieves basically the same result but keeps the President separate to the legislature.

Can we please end this popular vote nonsense now?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_federal_election,_1990

 

Where did you get the notion no presidential election winner didn't get at least 50% of the popular vote? President Obama got greater than 50% in both his wins, as did Ronald Reagan and a host of others, in fact the majority of US elections produced winners having >50% of the vote.......how do people come up with this nonsense.....oooops, I forgot- you just make up "alternative facts", LOL.

While the national popular vote does not put a winner in the White House, it is certainly not "nonsense". The popular vote in each state determines who the electoral college votes go to - to say the popular vote is nonsense is ignorance on a colossal scale......

 

You misunderstand. 50% of the country's population, not the voting population.

As I said before, the NPV has no legal basis whatsoever. It is irrelevant. Please do not put words in my mouth.

 

Got it, thanks........BTW, I agreed with you on the NPV. The popular vote, state by state, is most certainly relevant. It is how electoral college votes are assigned......

 

That's how it is today. But Electoral Votes are allocated based on whatever process the state legislatures decide, because the Electoral Votes belong to the state. Maine and Nebraska have a different system devised by their state legislatures where each Congressional District gets one Electoral Vote, with the statewide popular vote winner receiving 2 Electoral Votes for the Senators.

Because Electoral Vote allocation is determined through the process of the state legislatures, we really could have any kind of Electoral College people want. The point is that the states play a major role in selecting the President, because the US is a decentralized political system.

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Jill Stein already looked into this. Don't you remember?

 

The Democratic side was so threatening, intimidating and in many areas literally violently dangerous that many people were afraid to publicly say they supported Donald Trump.

In addition, the pollsters tended to ask registered voters and NOT people with voting histories. Most people who are not registered to vote or are but do not vote generally will always lie claiming they at registered and have voted.

What all people think and what VOTERS WHO VOTE think are two VERY different groups of people. To do an accurate poll it would be necessary to examine actual election division voting records. Not only is that time consuming and costly, most election divisions now restrict access (but shouldn't) including to safeguard voter fraud they want as most voter divisions are very politically partisan. Even IF they were trying to do a legitimate poll it can't be done without a good list you start with.

 

I suppose in a round about way, like how the "popular vote" elects members of parliament within local electorates, then those MPs vote for the Prime Minister.

Democracy on a decentralised level is still democracy. A better form of democracy, I would argue. When power is decentralised your representation increases. In 1788 for instance each Representative in the NH House of Reps had only 2300 citizens to represent. Chances are those voters personally knew him.

The same cannot be said for a Congress wherein each representative handles 700000 citizens. You are nothing.

My apologies for snapping earlier, I was quite hungover yesterday.

 

In a manner of speaking, yes. The pollsters would call and ask if you supported Trump or Clinton. If you answered Trump, your next questions would be difficult enough to make the vast majority of people to say they are not sure, or I don't know. The poll would end, and you would be put into the incomplete column. They pollsters keep doing this until they get the results they like, or are being pressured to get. Also, some of the people would lie about supporting Hillary because it is treated as a thought crime to support Trump.

 

So people lying to pollsters? I ain;t buying it, and I heard it voiced in the media. It would be believable is polling was done face to face. But telling someone you do not know, on the phone, a lie, is not believable, for me.

So, they must not be polling a representative sample, which means NONE of them were doing it, which is a bit hard to swallow.

Somehow, Hillary was over represented in all of those polls. The polling represented the opinions and predictions of MSM. Sanders never had a chance, trump never had a chance in the minds of the MSM and their experts.

MSM was disconnected from the voters, the people, and so was polling. Because people lied to both MSM and pollsters? What made them lie? The war MSM was waging on trump, trying to turn him into some monster? So given MSM says he is a monster if a pollster calls, you do not have the nerve to tell someone you do not know, that you support trump? I would not have done that and do not know anyone who would.

These polls on trump you see these days which MSM and the faux liberals so delight in are polling the same kinds of people These people are not reflecting reality no more than the election polling reflected reality. The skew away from trump is still there in this method of polling. Coincidently we saw the same thing with Brexit. Were they lying too, to pollsters, out of embarrassment?

 

Musta been them Ruskies....

 

So far as I know, most states swung within the margin of error. They just swung a different way than was anticipated. It doesn't mean the media made up the polls. Trump lost the popular vote and barely won many of the swing states that gave him his electoral results.

 

It could be that not as many illegal votes were cast for Clinton as they calculated. For example, only 800,000 non-citizens voted as far as can be determined and they underestimated how many times Democratic poll workers in Michigan would run the same ballots over and over thru the counting machines etc.

 

It should be quite obvious why the polls were wrong by now.
Selective polling can produce any result you want. Pollsters have been led to believe that polls will sway enough people on the fence to
vote the way the presented polls indicate the popular feeling, safety in numbers mind set. It's a psychological ruse that falls apart when someone like Trump, with a populous message against the system ie the left wing media and Washington in general conducts himself in the same way they are really feeling, and convinces them to stick with him, we can do this.

The democrats have basically been exposed, Obama going out the last month and basically being the campaigner -in - chief only solidified trumps victory. It assured us they were worried, we smelled the fear.
They don't know what to do now except scream non-stop, it has reached the level of comedy, if it wasn't so sad.

 

Some of that is true, people afraid to commit to the horrific embarrassment of being Trump supporter.

 

Good point.

 

Exactly.

 

The polling results weren't that far off.

The RCP avg. had Hillary winning the NPV by 3.2%, she won the NPV by 2.1%.

Nothing wrong there, outside of expected polling error.

She lost 3 states (MI, WI, PA) by small margins (well within the margin of error), when the late deciders broke heavily in Trump's favor.

It wasn't the "media polls being wrong".

It was more about people like Nate Silver/Larry Sabato/etc. misinterpretting the potential effect of late deciders (based on historical precedent).

And, obviously, most election "predictions" failed to factor in Hillary's massive underperformance (of Obama's numbers) among blacks in Detroit and Milwaukee.

Once again, Hillary won the NPV by 2.1%.

 

Why did fox news polls have hillary winning then? It would mostly poll right wing people who come to their site. If I remember correctly the polls just asked people who came to their site who they would vote for.

 

yes, they lied, they got tired of the liberal name calling crap and they lied, it was easier than listening to some liberal trying to shame them into voting for Hillary.

 

where on earth did you get that info, Aunt Hillary?

 

For the most part, it's just an error of methodology. Most pollsters are very specific about who they poll. For example, a pollster might figure (usually based on past elections) that x% of voters will be Republican, y% will be Democrat, and z% will be Independent, so they try to get their sample to reflect that. For those polls, the error is mainly in their predictions of party affiliation and turnout - predicting turnout can be real haywire, and when it has been spot on it has been more likely due to coincidence, as the most accurate pollsters from election to election change.

Other polls don't care about such methodology, and are unreliable for that reason. For example, I remember liberals during the election citing certain polls that looked best for Hillary - I can't remember who specifically did the poll, but the pollster didn't try regulating party affiliation in the poll, so in one case they had somewhere in the mid-40s of respondents being registered Democrats, and I think it was like 17% Republican. If you take a poll with 45% Democrats, 17% Republicans, and the remaining 38% independents, you should expect Democrats to be ahead by a large margin in that poll, but you can also expect that poll to be unreliable.

538 did a great thing, where they took in polls but tried correcting for their errors (so a poll might say Clinton +8, but 538's correction would reduce that to Clinton +5). It was a great idea, but I think the problem was that they undercorrected.


The average of national polls in the end wasn't that far off - I think it favored Clinton by like a point and a half more than actual results. The real problem was in state polls, which have much more variability: they're harder to predict. Because if there is a national wave, perhaps where a net 2% of voters change to become Republicans, that won't be reflected as 2% in every state. You'll have some states where there is little change, and some states where there is a seachange - it's really hard to predict and analyze that in a given state. The LA Times poll was unique in trying to address this problem, because it tracked specific people over time, based on their voting in 2012. So Romney got x% and Obama y%, so at the start of their poll they made x% of their sample people who voted for Romney and y% people who voted for Obama, trying to address that problem and be able to better see such changes. The problem is that when you do that, its easy to have a sample that is off - maybe you coincidentally sampled people who moved to the right, but didn't get others (their poll had some of the most pro-Trump results).

But the LA Times poll was more susceptable to error in accounting for new voters (oddly, you'd expect that to favor Clinton in its results, but it didn't). That's another problem for pollsters - trying to gauge how people who didn't vote in the past would vote now. That is a bigger problem in primaries - polling experts figured that there was a 5% chance that either Trump or Carson winning: but that was based on past primary voters. They couldn't account for new primary voters, which largely broke for Trump and (to a lesser extent) Carson.

Key takeaway: the polls, on the whole, didn't have some undue bias, but were largely honest errors.

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The national polls were off by more than usual, though not incredibly far off, but the real problem was in state polls. Going into election night, no one really saw MI or PA as being contentious.