At the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, Larry Sabato has established a remarkable track record. He’s never been wrong in predicting the next president, and he’s rarely missed the mark in lesser races. This year, that was not the case. Sandy Hausman spoke with a member of Sabato’s team about what went wrong.
In their well respected newsletter, the Center for Politics issued an apology.
“What can we say?” the analysts asked. “We blew it.”
The so-called Crystal Ball gave the election to Hillary Clinton. Even if she lost Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio, Larry Sabato’s team said her Midwestern “firewall” of states would hold. Those states had not only voted for Barack Obama twice, but hadn’t voted for a Republican since the 80’s. In fact, political analyst Geoffrey Skelley says that didn’t happen.
“This election I think really can be boiled down to about 100 and some odd thousand votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The shifts that were happening in the Midwest ended up allowing Trump to very narrowly break through in Wisconsin and Michigan – also Ohio, but that wasn’t close. In Wisconsin and Michigan it was very close and also in Pennsylvania, and that ended up being the difference in the election.”
The center was also surprised when Republican Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania were re-elected, although they picked 31 other races correctly. Skelley says he and the other analysts depend on polling data and inside information from campaigns and parties.
“That had largely served us pretty well.”
But there are growing problems with polls. For example, federal law does not allow robo-calling to cell phones, so many pollsters still rely on landlines which can be automatically dialed at random.
“Over half the country uses a cell phone predominantly now.”
And, he adds, it’s harder to get a large sample.
“People in general are less likely to participate in polls.”
But there were likely other reasons for mistaken predictions. The center wrote: “The Crystal Ball is shattered. We’ll pick up the pieces starting next week as we try to unpack what happened in this election. We have a lot to learn, and we apologize to our readers for our errors.”