"crucial swing states" run by Repub governments... more so then in Dem states.

If these polls referenced above were done so far after the election, how does it rule out that certain small segment of people who want to align with a winner? If they lie one way (too embarrassed to say their voting for DT) who's to say they wont lie the other way?

On the day of the election, those undecideds mostly split for DT. Also, she lost some voters whose support had been weak.

Only shenanigans does.

We need to stop believing they are scientifically representative or accurate.

Even if they are 'inaccurate' (which I do not believe), to be skewed so improbably in one direction is not explainable except as voter disenfranchisement/election fraud by the party toward which they are skewed.
Any other explanation seems grasping at straw.

I think cases can be made for both of those occurring. Election fraud is probably the most under-reported and uninvestigated threats/crimes in our country. We just need to be very careful about using problematic exit polls to prove election fraud.

about turnout models causing exit poll inaccuracy are at least as suspect as the exit polls results. It is an ad hoc explanation.

If the exit poll table is 100 feet from the polling place there is plenty of space to avoid speaking to them if you want to. Exit pollsters are also often younger women and there are often banners on the table identifying the exit poll site by organization sponsoring it. The exit poll questionnaires also have as many as 40 questions to answer.

So who would tend to self select toward that table and who would tend to walk in the other direction? It's just not a random sample. Angry older white men don't go near an exit pollster and a young woman is unlikely to chase them down when there's a much friendlier face right behind them. They are supposed to interview every fifth voter. Turns out that's a lot different than interviewing one of every five voters.

Back in 2004 there was an article in one of the newspaper magazines (NYT?) by an exit pollster trying to explain why she thought the exit polls were so wrong. She said that all through the day she felt she was not getting a good sample of respondents. She said she made an honest effort to question everyone she was supposed to, but some people just blew past her with a wave and she felt during the day it was skewing her results. When the exit polls turned out so wrong, she said she wasn't surprised and she in a tiny way blamed herself for it.

The fact is that angry older white male voters are not going to stop and talk to a young woman working for a media conglomerate at the same rate as other people. So who are the Republican's most reliable voters?

Exit polls have many factors to overcome, and anybody selling some idiotic theory based on the "raw data" of an exit poll should be considered the same level of charlatan as those selling theories on how climate change isn't real or vaccines result in autism.

https://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspiracy-theories-are-totally-baseless/

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit/

in place, THEN we see how accurate (or not) the exit polling is.

IMHO we don't need to wait around for "proof" that electronic election fraud has been committed - its alarming enough that proof exists that it COULD BE.... Isnt that enough??? You didn't see bankers wait around to see if anyone would steal money from electronic banking systems - no they immediately instituted safeguards, security, audit procedures capable of detecting fraud.

Then of course theres that whole mess with Crosscheck - how many showed up to vote and were either turned away or cast a provisional ballot that would not be counted - people thinking they voted but their ballots not counted would account for osme of the discrepancy.

Had close to 70% early voting, how can exit polling be correct?

I asked this question before the election and never heard a good explanation.

Which ironically can make them more accurate (since pre-election polls are typically much more accurate than exit polls).

If exit polls only for same day voting no way Trump won Florida!
Hillary had huge early vote advantage.

People insist on trying to use the "raw data" without understanding that is useless.

from enough people to extrapolate the results from their raw data. What they do, instead, is go through their sample and adjust their sample to make it look demographically like the sample that they believe will vote, and that is substantially based on the previous election cycle exit polls, plus voting record, for Likely Voter polls.

There are several sources of error contained in this method, but the most obvious (and most lethal) source of error is a change in turnout between elections. In essence, the method they use would be very accurate if they already had the exit polling for the election they are trying to predict, but of course they don't have that yet.

Turnout changes from election to election are hard to detect in advance. When both candidates have high unfavorables, as they did this year, they can be a bear. No matter how one tries to adjust the Likely Voter screen, it will be wrong.

Checking against exit polling shows that turnout changes, high third party candidate involvement and most specifically, high turnout in some areas shifted the results. But it also confirms that the voting tallies were accurate.

I'll never trust that site again

has to stop a few days before the election.

They were one of the few that was showing her losing ground all the way up to the election. She was down to about 55% chance of victory on election day. That was down from upwards of 70% in the late summer and early fall. Nate even mentioned that her "lead" was soft going in because of all of the "undecideds". Remember, she only lost the EC because of about 85,000 votes spread over about 4 states. That's REAL tight. Basically, Nate got it right.

He adds secret sauce to the actual results in an effort to be predictive. To what extent being predictive actually cook the books, who knows. I consider it more art than science. I.e. him getting it right is akin to flipping a coin and getting it right.

statistics.

Getting it right a month before is the real trick.

The classic problem in the use of statistics for single events is that it is a logical fallacy that statistics have anything to do with the outcome of a single event. We know the statistical probability of flipping a coin, but just because it comes up heads once in a while doesn't mean the predictions for tails was wrong.

In other words, the problem is with the reader. Everyone should have been concerned when her chances were falling. When they fell below 60%, there was a real reason to worry. More importantly, when she "only" had 44% of nominal support, that left a lot of room for things to "break" his way. When you have 49%, it's hard to lose. I got concerned when she fell to 55% but never thought he could win that many Midwestern states. And he barely did. The flip side is that the basic reason he won one of them, is why he won more.

... the Clinton margin could disappear with a slight polling mistake. Silver warned it wasn't in the bag.

'Fuck Nate Silver, he just wants a horse race!!! Sam Wang has it at 99%'

Or words to that effect.

I think too many people got caught up with the big 65/35 number on Clinton's side and confused it with a polling number when it was really "odds" or chances of winning.

I think he even said something about the numbers being great odds for betting on a game but not so much when the fate of our country is at stake.

What really hit home was he gave Trump the same Chance as the Cubs winning the series. *gulp*

Like everybody else, I got caught up with the "in the bag" feelings. But when I read Silver's warnings and I started looking at the margins in the battleground states, I got that sinking feeling I had in 2004. About a week before the 2004 election, I read about all the anti gay marriage legislation the repigs put on the ballots around the country and I thought "uh oh"

... the much larger percentage of "undecided" voters this time compared to 2012. He wrote articles about why he gave Obama a much stronger probability of victory over Romney compared to Clinton over Trump, despite pretty similar polling margins, and undecided voters were the common theme of the articles.

He also had a disadvantage because there weren't many polls done in the final days before the election... after Comey pulled his BS stunt.

Compared to other sites, like the Princeton Consortium (Wang), Silver was far less optimistic... and many people on DU hated him for it back then!

Silver might have been wrong too, but he was "less wrong" than the others.

Comey found nothing and said so. His tittle tattle might have inspired a clueless independent or two but not enough to put him over so Team T relied on their now-familiar vote rigging to produce that miraculous 6-point leap in WI for instance.

Comey would have loved to sink Hillary the way he's sunk many another Dem -- the Democratic mayoral candidate of my own town, for instance -- but he didn't have the stuff to do it. So he gave a kayfabe performance and now the RW noise machine is pretending he took her out. He didn't.

less than 1% -- that this small shift accounts for it.

it was probably a large number of Gary Johnson's supporters and also some of the supporters of that other 3rd party dipshit, Jill Stein.

3rd party ALWAYS pivots at the end. What date defines the end is the $100,000 question. Traditionally you get an October surprise. I.e. campaigns attempt to come up with a big win in early October, the idea being later is simply too late.

In September I think, the state by state polling on rcp looked like election day.

His interference in the election makes him America's number one deplorable.

People, they wouldn't have gone out for him if they weren't encouraged at the last minute.

Uggh, nobody is ever going to understand what happened and how knowing he suddenly had a chance was all he needed to secure a very narrow victory. Comey. Jail. Comey. Jail. Jesus, we are so stupid.

She said it was just easier to do it this way.

If she could do it over, she wouldn't do it this way.

That worked for me Day One!

It's more of the equally hated bullshit. If you had to wait until the last minute with a clear danger to sanity and all human decency to decide that oh yes her e mail server is the same as you know rounding up people and deporting them and sexually molesting women and disrespecting military dead and the disabled and on and on. We no longer can believe exit polls. So we have no check on anything. That's how they knew it was stolen in the Ukraine. We ain't winning shit again unless we actually demand fair elections. Nothing to see here. Move along. Democrats make me despair as much as anyone. Always making nice with Nazi's.

https://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspiracy-theories-are-totally-baseless/

Oh look the Nation! I hear they LOVE Putin. Oh well.