Presidential Race Polls Inaccuracy Is Exceeded Only By Their Number

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Who needs the comic strips in the morning papers these days? The latest antics of the U.S. presidential candidates and the pollsters are a lot more amusing. And this phenomenon is not new; we even featured it in our December 2014 post regarding the off-base headline trumpeting the victory of Dewey over Truman (sic). In alll fairness, it is not at all easy to do a good political poll, and the current campaigns in the U.S. may be among the most weird in history, due to the unpredictable behavior of Donald Trump, the political baggage of Hilary Clinton, and most recently Ted Cruz’s claim that Ben Carson was dropping out of the race. But there are some big limitations in the polls themselves, most importantly that so many people polled don’t vote and so many people who do vote don’t get polled. And these gaffes are not limited to the U.S. In May 2015 in the U.K. the polls predicted that the vote would be divided equally between Conservative and Labour candidates, but the actual results favored the Conservatives, and Prime Minister David Cameron. Again, the villain was a poor choice of the sample, which included too many younger and politically active voters at the expense of under-sampling older voters.