How Analytical Models Failed Clinton [View all]

National Politics |By Charlie Cook, December 30, 2016

How Analytical Models Failed Clinton



This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on December 27, 2016

"The Novem­ber elec­tions pit­ted Demo­crats against Re­pub­lic­ans, con­ser­vat­ives against lib­er­als, Trump-style pop­u­lists and tea parti­ers against the es­tab­lish­ment and con­ven­tion­al politi­cians. An­oth­er con­test, fol­lowed mainly by polit­ic­al afi­cion­ados, matched tra­di­tion­al poll­sters against newly fash­ion­able ana­lyt­ics wiz­ards, some of whom—pre­ten­tiously in my opin­ion—called them­selves “data sci­ent­ists.”

It was well known that tra­di­tion­al polling was hav­ing prob­lems. The numb­ing ef­fect of bil­lions of tele­market­ing calls and the ad­vent of caller ID and voice mail had re­duced re­sponse rates (the per­cent­age of com­pleted in­ter­views for every hun­dred at­tempts) from the 40s a couple of dec­ades ago to the high single di­gits. As they struggled to get truly rep­res­ent­at­ive samples, poll­sters “weighted” their data more than ever be­fore, mak­ing as­sump­tions of what the elect­or­ate would look like on elec­tion days that were weeks, months, or even a year or more away. ........

...........Ex­per­i­enced journ­al­ists might ar­gue that the over­re­li­ance by re­port­ers on both polls and ana­lyt­ics has led to a de­crease in shoe-leath­er, on-the-ground re­port­ing that might have picked up move­ments in the elect­or­ate that the polls missed. As the Michigan res­ults came in on elec­tion night, I vividly re­called that two con­gress­men from Michigan—one a Demo­crat, the oth­er a Re­pub­lic­an—had been warn­ing me for months that Michigan was more com­pet­it­ive than pub­licly thought. I wished I had listened.

The ana­lyt­ic­al mod­els for both sides poin­ted to a Clin­ton vic­tory, al­beit not a run­away. The Clin­ton cam­paign and su­per PACs had sev­er­al of the most highly re­garded polling firms in the Demo­crat­ic Party, yet in the places that ended up mat­ter­ing, very little if any polling was done. So while 2016 wasn’t a vic­tory for tra­di­tion­al polling, it cer­tainly took a lot of the luster from ana­lyt­ics. In the end, big data mattered very little. ......"

http://cookpolitical.com/story/10205