How did so many pollsters get the presidential election so wrong? The answer may involve shame, some of which belongs to research organizations themselves.
Research firms participate in the high-profile polling to showcase their services for brand marketers. Amid Donald Trump's huge upset, those firms now have been forced into what could be a lengthy navel-gazing exercise over why their methodologies failed.
"We're doing a range of things at SurveyMonkey, and I know my colleagues across the industry are doing the same things, to try to figure out are we having a small problem or is it something bigger?" said Chief Research Officer Jon Cohen. "We don't yet know whether this is the cataclysmic polling failure we've all anticipated for a decade or more or it's something more run of the mill."
The other part of the shame belonged to Trump voters, many of them unwilling to admit, particularly to live human beings on the other end of the phone, their plans to vote for the president-elect.
That was an effect that Trafalgar Group, a small Atlanta-based Republican-affiliated polling firm, began noticing during the Republican primaries. So it developed a system to counteract the effect. Trafalgar started asking voters not only who they planned to vote for, but also who they thought their neighbors would vote for. The latter percentage consistently came out higher number than the former, said Robert Cahaly, senior strategist.
"On a live poll, the deviation was that Trump was understated probably 6%-7%, and on an automatic poll it was probably understated 3%-4%," Mr. Cahaly said.
Using its adjusted numbers, Trafalgar predicted upsets for Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania and Michigan. And the firm's 306-232 prediction in the overall Electoral College vote may well end up matching the final total. The methodology got a "C" from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com, but it ended up being closer than FiveThirtyEight's system of consolidating results from a large number of polls that mostly were skewed wrongly toward Hillary Clinton.
Trafalgar did have Mr. Trump winning Nevada and New Hampshire, which he apparently didn't, but had him losing Wisconsin rather than winning as he did. It all evened out. "In Wisconsin, we didn't even poll, but made a prediction that it was close based on knowing there was a deviation" elsewhere, Mr. Cahaly said.
