Pollfish Presidential Election 2016
Since January, Pollfish has been working closely with David M Rothschild, Sam Corbett-Davis, and Tobias Konitzer at PredictWise to gather information and create political polls to find out what 40,000 Americans individually thought about the Presidential Candidates and major issues such as gun control, immigration and national security.
Over the course of 2016, Pollfish surveyed Americans via their mobile phones to produce quick results to gauge reactions and public sentiment. With the data we gathered and modeling insight from the PredictWise team, our survey methodology:
- Successfully predicted the results of 45 out of 50 states, within the margin of error.
- Found consistent support for Trump in Pennsylvania.
- A very close race in the rest in the Rust Belt—with Trump taking several key swing states.
When most polls believed that Clinton would secure the important swing states by a strong margin, our voter intention polls, targeting geographic and demographic sub-groups, told a very different story. In September, our polls showed Clinton losing Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and a tossup in Michigan.
Ultimately, the end results of our research showed Trump in the lead by as much as 5 points in both Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and narrowly securing the majority in Florida by 1 point, which he later did.
Our findings predicted Trump’s “shocking” win because we were able to calibrate individual feelings towards key issues in Trump’s platform into our models. Our polls consistently showed the majority of states mirroring Trump’s views, such as his strong stance on immigration:
Alongside this data, Clinton was rightly predicted by us to win the popular vote overall, with Trump gaining 47%—both of these statistics panned out as the end result of the popular vote. Our data focussed on the two main parties and did not allow third party votes, hence the larger margin between the two.
For the PredictWise article visit:
http://predictwise.com/blog/2016/11/pollfish-election-2016/
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