'The sky is not falling': Two major studies show election polls are not getting less accurate
By Scott Clement
June 1 at 7:00 AM
Donald Trump’s 2016 election and other surprising election results around the world in recent years set off alarms about a crisis in election polling. But two massive studies come to the opposite conclusion: Polls in recent elections are just about as accurate as they have been historically, if not a little better.
FiveThirtyEight updated its historical database of U.S. poll accuracy to include national, state and congressional district surveys from 2016 to this year. Here’s how the website’s founder, Nate Silver, summed up the findings:
“Polls of the November 2016 presidential election were about as accurate as polls of presidential elections have been on average since 1972. And polls of gubernatorial and congressional elections in 2016 were about as accurate, on average, as polls of those races since 1998. Furthermore, polls of elections since 2016 — meaning, the 2017 gubernatorial elections and the various special elections to Congress this year and last year — have been slightly more accurate than average.”
Silver’s analysis focused on the performance of 2016 polls in particular, finding that national pre-election polls missed the vote margin between Trump and Clinton by an average of 3.1 percentage points in 2016, lower than the 4.1-point average in elections since 1972.
State presidential polls missed by an average of 5.2 points in 2016, slightly higher than the historical average of 4.8 points. Combining both national and state polls, 2016 errors were slightly lower than the historical norm.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/06/01/the-sky-is-not-falling-two-major-studies-show-election-polls-are-not-getting-less-accurate/