Abstract
This study examined the accuracy of the various forecasting methods of the 2016 US Presidential Elections. The findings revealed a high accuracy in predicting the popular vote. However, this is most suitable in an electoral system which is not divided into constituencies. Instead, due to the Electoral College method used in the US elections, forecasting should focus on predicting the winner in every state separately. Nevertheless, miss-predicted results in only a few states led to false forecasting of the elected president in 2016. The current methods proved less accurate in predicting the vote in states that are less urbanized and with less diverse society regarding race, ethnicity, and religion. The most challenging was predicting the vote of people who are White, Protestant Christians, and highly religious. In order to improve pre-election polls, this study suggests a few changes to the current methods, mainly to adopt the “Cleavage Sampling” method that can better predict the expected turnout of specific social groups, thus leading to higher accuracy of pre-election polling.
Highlights
Pre-elections polls are a tool for candidates in elections to help them win their political campaign, from the top tier—with national elections—to the lowest level—local elections [1]
It was evident that it is more likely to have less accurate predictions in states with a higher percentage of White populations (r = 0.40 or r = 0.48). These findings suggest that the New York Times (NYT) and the Huff-Post predictions were based on models that can cope with states with highly urbanized populations, with more a diverse society regarding race, ethnicity, and religion
It is most suitable in an electoral system which is not divided into constituencies, such as in Israel [62]
Summary
Pre-elections polls are a tool for candidates in elections to help them win their political campaign, from the top tier—with national elections—to the lowest level—local elections [1]. Regardless of the user, the main reason to use these election-focused surveys is the desire to know accurate information where uncertainty is around. For this purpose, the science of polling has been developing over the past century to minimize the uncertainty in the forecast of election results by obtaining more statistically significant results [3]. While trying to predict as exactly as possible the results of upcoming elections, increasing accuracy, pollsters cope with [4]: methodological problems (such as coverage, sampling, non-responding, weighting, adjustment, or treatment of non-disclosers); socio-political problems (such as characteristics of the campaign, of the parties, or the electoral system); and sociological problems (such as characteristics of the society, its cleavages, or traditions).
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