The polls this election season are going to be as trustworthy as everything else the mainstream media puts out, which means not very. From Pater Tenebrarum at acting-man.com:
Is Clinton’s Lead Over Trump as Large as Advertised?
Once upon a time, political polls tended to be pretty accurate (there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but they were few and far between). Recently there have been a few notable misses though. One that comes to mind is the Brexit referendum. Shortly before the vote, polls indicated the outcome would be a very close one, while betting markets were indicating a solid win of the “remain” vote. The actual result was around 52:48 in favor of “leave”, so this was quite a big miss.
Another case that confounded even the most seasoned forecasters was the race for the Republican nomination. See for instance this article by Mish from January, in which he rightly berates famous election forecaster Nate Silver for vastly underestimating Trump’s chances to win. Silver held them to be around 12% to 13% at the time, which turned out to be a miss of truly monumental proportions. He kept missing the mark for many more months to come (essentially until the point in time when Trump had made the transition to “inevitable nominee”).
We currently follow press coverage on the presidential election only cursorily, for lack of time, and also because it seems both very superficial and one-sided. The mainstream media bias in this election seems astonishingly blatant. To quote Stefan Molyneux, there is apparently no mud one cannot sling at the orange-haired maniac. We are of course well aware that Donald Trump has an uncanny ability to put his foot into his mouth, but it seems almost as if little else is discussed (skim through a few MSM articles at random and see how much you learn about his policy proposals – good luck).
On the other hand, it is not as if Hillary Clinton were widely considered an angel. The woman has spent decades mired in scandals, from her credulity-stretching career as a cattle futures trader in the 70s, to the Whitewater affair, Travelgate, the harassment of women pointing fingers at her philandering husband, to the recent questions about the Clinton foundation, the gigantic speaking fees she gets for mouthing platitudes at corporate gatherings for 20 minutes a stretch, the e-mail server controversy (and not to forget, her sociopathic streak)… and we’re sure we have left a few things out.
In short, she is just as polarizing a figure as Trump is widely held to be. Then there is the fact that Donald Trump continues to draw huge crowds wherever he goes to speak, a feat Hillary Clinton is not known for. Perhaps this is merely a sign that Trump voters are more energized for their candidate – but that seems quite an important factoid by itself. Remember the Brexit post mortem in this context: the “remain” camp mainly failed because it was unable to create even the slightest bit of excitement for its cause.
All of this made us wonder why Hillary Clinton is so solidly ahead in political polls. Below is a chart of the NYT’s “national polling average”, which concludes that her current lead boils down to an “89% chance of winning the presidency”. Really? That sounds a bit like Nate Silver judging Trump’s chances to win the Republican nomination back in January, i.e., it is a bit hard to believe.
To continue reading: US Presidential Election – How Reliable are the Polls?
