I
found two sources that displayed polls in different ways, which it was hard to
find ones from along the campaign trail, specifically from different months.
Majority of the polls and the two I’ll talk about below have Clinton ahead at
the end, which clearly isn’t how it played out. They did nail the majority of
the sates she did win, but unfortunately, electoral votes won. In my opinion
that is a poor way to judge the Presidential votes, but that is a rant for
another time.
According
to BBC News, Hillary held a four percent lead over Trump to win the
Presidential election. The poll took in to account early voting, which for
Clinton more democrats turned out in Nevada for this occasion. This later
changed in recent polls to have switched in Trumps favor, which is seen to be
due to a large day of voting turnout. The polls can show one thing, then
totally turn out the opposite way later on. National polls and battleground states
were accessed as well to compile this data shown.
I
looked at another source, USA Today, which compiled interactive polls from
along the election. This showed the bigger picture by displaying national
polling averages, historical averages, headlines driving the polls, and state
polling averages. They seemed to ignore electoral and popular votes as well as
focusing on polls entertaining specific issues or attending to the race of the
voters per candidate.
If
I were the one conducting a poll I would take into demographics, especially in
this past race as it was a major issue surrounding the candidate’s stances,
Trump in particular. For Hillary, I would ask questions regarding how she would
approach state by state issues to better understand these state polls. As
someone never pays attention to politics, these various polls confuse me as to
what information they’re built off of. I like seeing how events at the time of
the polls affect the results, which can make or break a candidate’s race depending
on the circumstances, which as the email scandal unwind toward the end for
Hillary it showed to hurt her. Ultimately, costing her the presidency.
http://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/2016/election/poll-tracker/
http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37450661
I think at this point all politicians are now less reliant on the polls because of their inaccuracy. I think this elections goes to show there are very things in life that are assured. The more and more the media looks at the polls the less and less they will rely on them in future elections.
ReplyDeleteI agree that we should be putting more interest in state polls and how to people who don't pay as much attention to politics (including me) the hundreds of different number can get confusing. Asking polls more closely related to certain issues state-by-state would definitely help the majority of the population get a better picture of the campaign.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more that we need to put more interest in state polls, and not just lookingat the big picture when it comes to polling. I am on board with you of not having an immense amount of knowledge about polling and politics in general. From what it seems like after having read peoples blog posts and done one of my own, that polling is a crap shoot when it comes down to it. There is no one hundred percent effective way to do polling, that doesn't mean we should be satisfied with the polling that was done this year but we have to know its limitations.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the straight out of Compton picture at the beginning replaced with "straight out of options." Polls seem to be losing their importance as time goes on. I think this is due to our increase in figuring out the details to the polls thanks to our development of technology. I agree with the way you see polls as I have not really ever learned about them into any depth before taking this class.
ReplyDeleteTaylor, you definitely have some interesting views on political polls. As I can agree with you to an extent that political polls can be used to scare unlikely voters into voting, it's also an important way of communicating an accurate evaluation of voters to both campaigns, campaign supporters, and voters across the country. I also like the fact that state polls need much more of an emphasis, because at the end of the day, national polls were very close to correctly predicting the popular vote, but at the same time they didn't account for states in the rust belt to swing back to red from blue from the 2012 election.
ReplyDelete