The day after the big presidential upset data was difficult to find. Now, think about the next election and what predicative data you’ll be seeing on TV news network.
How did the polls get
it so wrong?
To be fair, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com was leery about some of the last polls, just days before the election -- especially when Clinton’s numbers narrowed to a 2.5
to 3.5 point lead, within the range of error.
Still, in the days before that -- the week leading up to the election -- many, including Silver, had posted daily predictive missives, giving
Clinton a big chance of winning. Early on November 8, FiveThirtyEight gave Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning
when culling all polling data.
Perhaps one bit of polling information that would have been good to get was that of Cambridge Analytica, the President-elect Trump data team.
Matt
Oczkowski, director of product for the company, told Wired.com, he noticed a decrease in black turnout, an increase in Hispanic turnout, and an increase in turnout among those over 55.
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Additionally, there was overwhelming turnout of voters in rural areas -- especially in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin.
Oczkowski said: “The amount of disenfranchised voters who
came out to vote in rural America has been significant.” He added: “This is not something that political intuition would tell you, but our models predicted most of these states
correctly.”
Why didn’t other polls have that? Because polling samples were very incorrect, especially among “likely voters.”
Welcome to the new world of big
data for elections, stuff that, on the whole, wasn’t at all that predictive. Even Trump wasn’t all that convinced that big data was needed for his campaign -- only hiring Cambridge
Analytica late in the campaign in the summer.
If you were were a brand manager of a particular product/service that failed to sell with this kind of data, you would ask yourself: Why -- in the
age of ever expanding information -- did my big data resources fail?
And if you are a TV news network looking at the next election, what important and valuable election poll content will
you use in future?