The pollsters did no better in 2016 than they did in 2012, when most of them had Mitt Romney winning. Their errant predictions can be blamed on methodological flaws and, in some cases, the biases they incorporate into their methodologies. However, SLL has another factor: many people voted differently than how they told the pollsters they would vote. After all the stigmatization of Donald Trump, some people were simply embarrassed to admit they were going to vote for him. As SLL said in “Trump in New Mexico”: “In the privacy of mail-in balloting or the voting booth, a surprising number will choose the former [Trump], regardless of what they’ve told family, friends, and pollsters.” From Jonathan Easley at thehill.com:
Pollsters and election modelers suffered an industry-shattering embarrassment at the hands of Donald Trump on Tuesday night.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, had long said the polls were biased against him. His claims — dismissed and mocked by the experts — turned out to be true.
“It’s going to put the polling industry out of business,” said CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “It’s going to put the voter projection industry out of business.”
Going into Election Day, a strong majority of pollsters and election modelers forecast that Democrat Hillary Clinton would coast to victory, with many predicting she would sweep the battlegrounds and win north of 300 electoral votes.
The final University of Virginia Center for Politics model had Clinton winning 322 electoral votes to 216 for Trump, with Clinton winning Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all states that she lost.
Liberals lashed out at data guru Nate Silver for giving Trump a 35 percent chance of victory heading into Election Day, claiming he was putting his thumb on the scale for Trump by making the race appear closer than it was.
Of the 11 national polls to be released in the final week of the race, only two — a Los Angeles Times/USC survey and one from IBD/TIPP — showed Trump with the lead.
The L.A. Times survey was criticized as “experimental” by industry experts for polling the same pool of people and for the way it weighted black voters.
But for the second consecutive presidential cycle, the L.A. Times and IBD/TIPP surveys were among the most accurate, making them the gold standard going forward.
The rest of the polls showed Clinton with leads of between 2 and 6 points, boosting the Democrat to a 3.3-point national lead in the RealClearPolitics average.
And the battleground data was just as biased against Trump.
There were no surveys released this year from Wisconsin that showed Trump with a lead.
Clinton held a 6.5 point lead in the Badger State heading into Election Day, and the state was not even discussed as on par with Michigan or Pennsylvania as a potential blue state pick-up for Trump.
Trump’s victory in Wisconsin — a state that has not gone for the GOP nominee since 1984 — helped him seal the deal.
In Michigan and Pennsylvania, deep blue states the GOP candidate has not won in decades, polls showed the race tightening in the home stretch, but only one poll, from Trafalgar Group, showed Trump with the lead.
Election modelers declined to flip either state into Trump’s column, even as the Clinton campaign rushed furiously to defend those states in the final days of the election.
And Trump won North Carolina by nearly 4 points, despite polls showing a toss-up there.
To continue reading: Pollsters suffer huge embarrassment
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
My standard reply to pollsters is “none of your damned business”.
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“in 2012, [most pollsters] had Mitt Romney winning.”
Really? I don’t remember that, although it could be because I wasn’t paying too much attention, having been highly confident, from the nomination all the way to the election, that Romney didn’t have the proverbial snowball’s chance in The Very Warm Place.
Something I have always wondered about polling, and never seen discussed, is what difference there is in political inclination between those who pick up any call and those (like me) who flatly refuse to pick up a call unless it is positively identified as coming from someone they know and actually want to talk to, and whether that difference is considered, or even known.
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I have wondered the same, because I too am one of those people who lets it go to voicemail when I don’t know who is calling.
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