One election winner, according to Harvard conference: the pollsters
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...