Why does nobody talk about how the 2016 polls messed up my whole view of polling data

I spent hours digging into that 2016 election polling after being way off in my own predictions, and it turned out the weighting models were ignoring education levels in rural areas like where I grew up in Ohio. Has anyone else found a specific stat that just flipped what you thought you knew about how numbers work?

3 comments

3 Comments

harpercampbell11d ago

Oh man, same here. I was so sure about those numbers and then it all just crumbled. It's wild how one little thing like that education weighting can totally mess with everything. Did you ever look into the 2020 polls after that to see if they fixed it?

the_sean10d ago

It's like that thing where you trust a weather app and it says sunny... then a flood shows up.

emmaking10d ago

Oh totally, I grew up near Dayton and back in 2016 everyone I knew was getting polled by landline only and my whole family was like "who even has a landline anymore" lmao. The education weighting thing is exactly what made me realize polls are basically just educated guesses with fancy math attached.