Polls Were Wrong in 2016: Polling Hasn’t Changed Much in 2020

Warning: Pollsters and pundits haven’t fixed the problems that caused them to be so disastrously wrong about the 2016 election.

President Trump’s First 100 Days: Day One. President-elect Donald Trump walks to take his seat for the inaugural swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Friday, January 20, 2017. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Must We Trust Polls?

Polling, and the pundits who reported on it, were not reliable predictors of the outcome of 2016’s election. Has anything changed?

Did the U.S. media, political analysts and pollsters fix the problems that plagued the 2016 pre-election data and we missed it?

There have been floods of ink on the Mueller investigation, the Mueller Report, the Ukraine, Trump’s impeachment and the Trump administration. Rivers of journalistic ink have flowed about various matters linked, however distantly, with the aforementioned themes.

If the reason polls and experts were so wrong in 2016 was a subject of great journalistic interest, why haven’t there been more stories on this subject?

Instead, longtime Democratic political analyst James Carville is confidently predicting that Democrats, led by Joe Biden, will win in a landslide victory in November. He isn’t alone.

To find out if he is right, let’s return in time to the 2016 election: What did James Carville know in 2016 and when did he know it?