Nytimes 2016 election results3/19/2024 ![]() ![]() They also suggest there are real shortcomings in how American politics are covered, including pervasive groupthink among media elites, an unhealthy obsession with the insider’s view of politics, a lack of analytical rigor, a failure to appreciate uncertainty, a sluggishness to self-correct when new evidence contradicts pre-existing beliefs, and a narrow viewpoint that lacks perspective from the longer arc of American history. But the answers are potentially a lot more instructive for how to cover Trump’s White House and future elections than the ones you’d get by simply blaming the polls for the failure to foresee the outcome. It turns out to have some complicated answers, which is why it’s taken some time to put this article together (and this is actually the introduction to a long series of articles on this question that we’ll publish over the next few weeks). Why, then, had so many people who covered the campaign been so confident of Clinton’s chances? This is the question I’ve spent the past two to three months thinking about. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968. 3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. If almost everyone got the first draft of history wrong in 2016, perhaps there’s still time to get the second draft right.Īnother myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. (Usually, these take the form of authoritatively worded analytical claims about the race, such as declaring which states are in play in the Electoral College.) Furthermore, editors and reporters make judgments about the horse race in order to decide which stories to devote resources to and how to frame them for their readers: Go back and read their coverage and it’s clear that The Washington Post was prepared for the possibility of a Trump victory in a way that The New York Times wasn’t, for instance. Instead, it’s increasingly common for articles about the campaign to contain a mix of analysis and reporting and to make plenty of explicit and implicit predictions. ![]() That may still largely be true for local reporters, but at the major national news outlets, campaign correspondents rarely stick to just-the-facts reporting (“Hillary Clinton held a rally in Des Moines today”). Perhaps the biggest myth is when traditional journalists claim they weren’t making predictions about the outcome. 2īy contrast, some traditional reporters and editors have built a revisionist history about how they covered Trump and why he won. Not all of these assessments were mea culpas - ours emphatically wasn’t (more about that in a moment) - but they at least grappled with the reality of what the models had said. After Trump’s victory, the various academics and journalists who’d built models to estimate the election odds engaged in detailed self-assessments of how their forecasts had performed. While data geeks and traditional journalists each made their share of mistakes when assessing Trump’s chances during the campaign, their behavior since the election has been different. But in the part of the story that I know best, horse-race coverage, 1 the results of the learning process have been discouraging so far. And I don’t expect many of the answers to be obvious or easy. But for journalists, given the exceptional challenges that Trump poses to the press and the extraordinary moment he represents in American history, it’s also imperative to learn from our experiences in covering Trump to date.Īs editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, which takes a different and more data-driven perspective than many news organizations, I don’t claim to speak to every question about how to cover Trump. It’s tempting to use the inauguration as an excuse to finally close the chapter on the 2016 election and instead turn the page to the four years ahead. ![]() On Friday at noon, a Category 5 political cyclone that few journalists saw coming will deposit Donald Trump atop the Capitol Building, where he’ll be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. ![]()
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