What We Relearned and Learned from the 2016 Elections: Comment on Gelman and Azari

Abstract

How soon we forget, and Gelman and Azari did not mention what baseball legend and language master Yogi Berra would have reminded us regarding the 2016 election polling: (1) “It’s ‘de ja vu’ all over again!” And (2) “...But the similarities are different!” (see Shapiro 2017a). This election hearkened back to the 1936 and especially the 1948 elections in which pollsters—as both pollsters and pundits—demonstrated unadulterated arrogance or hubris. In 1936 the folks atThe LiteraryDigestmagazine flaunted the prediction based on their multiple million ballot straw poll (that had been mailed to their subscribers and names from telephone, car registration and other lists—which had a distinctively upper status bias) that Alfred Landon would defeat President Franklin Roosevelt. The poll had gotten the winner right in every election from 1916 through FDR in 1932, so what could go wrong? Everything, thanks to the political realignment in which lower status voters missed in the straw poll disproportionately broke toward the Democrat Roosevelt. That year the more “scientific” (that is, engaging in something closer, but still far from, probability sampling) pollsters George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley predicted an easy Roosevelt victory and put theDigest to shame (it went out of business not long afterward). But Crossley and Gallup—who was then and still is themost famous of the lot—still underestimatedRoosevelt’s vote (60.7%) by fully 7 percentage points (compared to the Digest’s 20 points), and Gallup continued to underestimate Roosevelt’s vote in the next two election. So something was still amiss in the polls. The question of poll accuracy during this time, as the pollsters announced their predictions, got some attention, including calls for congressional investigation of the polls (on this forgotten and not well-remembered point, see especially Fried (2012)