After Donald Trump’s political-world-shattering upset of Hillary Clinton, the polling industry finds itself facing an existential crisis. A vast majority of the key polls were not just wrong, they were humiliatingly wrong. Though a very select few — most notably the LA Times, IBD/TIPP, and Trafalgar Group — actually got it about right, most pollsters ended up grossly over-sampling Democrats and failing to account for Trump’s “hidden” supporters. Below is a comparison of the final polling data going into the election Tuesday morning and the final results, which often ended up looking quite different.
On the morning of the election, Real Clear Politics’ average of the national polls showed Clinton with a 3.3% national lead over Trump and a projected Electoral College victory of 272 to 266. Instead, Clinton ended up with only a 2.2% popular vote advantage and suffering a devastating 227 to 304 loss. At no point before the election did the state poll averages show Trump winning the necessary 270 electoral votes.
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