One election winner, according to Harvard conference: the pollsters

Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - 14:50 in Mathematics & Economics

It’s debatable whether the midterm elections delivered a demonstrably better night for Democrats than Republicans. But it was inarguably a big win for pollsters, said FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver at Harvard’s Political Analytics Conference. “The narrative after 2016 was that polls are full of it,” he said during a discussion Friday with Lynn Vavreck, professor of American Politics and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Silver’s website was one of many that forecast a likely win for Hillary Clinton in the last presidential election (though by a smaller margin than most), and the conference explored how polling has been further refined since then. “This was the best year for polling since 2008,” he said. “Not only is polling not broken, but I think that the media should be writing that story. Everyone who wrote the ‘polling is broken’ stories in 2016 is being irresponsible by not writing about how...

Read the whole article on Harvard Science

More from Harvard Science

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net