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Forget voters, pollsters need to check themselves

Polls are part of the political process, especially in presidential races. So it was not unusual for poll after poll to be conducted in the race between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Those polls showed how each of the candidates had his or her moments of momentum and also his or her lack thereof. One day Clinton was up by seven percentage points; a few days later the race was too close to call.

Part of the reason the polls flip-flopped so much is the candidates kept having issues come up that hurt them. For Trump, there was the sexual video and the women who said he had made unwelcome advances toward them. For Clinton, there was the email controversy that never went away. There were other issues, too, but those two were big ones as Election Day neared.

Still, even as voters cast their ballots on Tuesday, most polls pointed to a Clinton victory. As we all know now, those polls were wrong. Trump pulled off what many described as a stunning upset by winning many of the toss-up states, including several in the Great Lakes region that had voted for Democratic candidates in the past.

What went wrong?

Polling experts will be trying to figure that out in the days and months ahead, but we believe there are many factors in play. Sometimes the electorate is unpredictable – people make up their minds on how they are going to vote at the very last minute, and it might not be how they were going to vote a week earlier. Or poll questions might be slanted to get a desired result, but not necessarily an accurate result. Sometimes a true representation of America is not captured in polls, so they don’t really reveal how an election is going to turn out.

The problem for the pollsters is when they are so wrong, it hurts their credibility. Michiganders only have to remember back to 1990, when John Engler trailed Gov. James Blanchard by double digits in polls the weekend before the election, only to pull off a victory no one saw coming. Trump’s victory was likewise not predicted.

Pollsters need to figure out what they are doing wrong, and fix the problems, or polls will continue to lose credibility with the public.

– Midland Daily News

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