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Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

And with good reason: polls measure popular vote, not electoral vote, and Trump most certainly did not win the popular vote by 8 points. He didn't even come close to that margin.

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I assume you're worried he didn't collect location data? Sometimes you can get the location data from their IP address or zip code(if it's a form).

So if this poll said Trump was "8 points ahead", where did it say he was "8 points ahead"? A generic statement of "8 points ahead" is, when hearing about a poll with zero other context read to mean "8 points ahead in a national poll of likely voters with a representative sample", which is a national popular vote measure of limited utility in predicting electoral outcome.

He was 8 points ahead in a national poll of likely voters with a representative sample when asked who they would be more likely to vote for. I don't have specifics besides the 8 pt. lead because I'm not on the analysis side of things and the results weren't published. And I agree, phone polling is fairly limited as far as outcome prediction goes. Part of the reason they didn't publish is because they thought it was a fluke.

So, did he end up with an 8-percentage-point national popular-vote lead? If not, seems the poll was inaccurate.

My original comment wasn't to prove the accuracy of the polling, rather, to show the bias of the media when reporting poll results. While the poll may have been innacurate,so were many of the polls that put Clinton ahead that they decided to publish.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between a poll and a model. Models aggregate many polls in ways which attempt to predict the Electoral College tally. This includes polls specific to individual states. In this election even state level polls were inaccurate which lead to model predictions being off.

Well, they shouldn't.

The point of polls is to predict who's going to win.

It's not that hard to take into account Electoral College anyways.

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