I think the situations around Trump and Brexit were importantly different, and it’s unfortunate that people conflate them as examples of forecaster error. With Brexit, the polls were essentially tied, and there was no outside factor that could assigning less than 40% chance to Brexit. With Trump, the national polling showed that Trump was unlikely to win the popular vote (and he didn’t!), and state polling showed Trump losing in PA, WI, MI *outside the margin of error*.
Unlike Brexit, there was no justification for having Trump favored or even at 40%+ to win! OTTOMH, the only thing that someone in 2016 could do to predict a Trump victory “for the right reasons” is to do a deep dive into polling bias by demographic, and somehow figure out that polls were overestimating support for Clinton among non-college whites (and/or figure out that social trust was correlated with vote choice in 2016 when it wasn’t in the past). Vague pontifications about “oh if you liberal elite step out of your bubble you’d understand why trump wins” don’t count :)
I think the situations around Trump and Brexit were importantly different, and it’s unfortunate that people conflate them as examples of forecaster error. With Brexit, the polls were essentially tied, and there was no outside factor that could assigning less than 40% chance to Brexit. With Trump, the national polling showed that Trump was unlikely to win the popular vote (and he didn’t!), and state polling showed Trump losing in PA, WI, MI *outside the margin of error*.
Unlike Brexit, there was no justification for having Trump favored or even at 40%+ to win! OTTOMH, the only thing that someone in 2016 could do to predict a Trump victory “for the right reasons” is to do a deep dive into polling bias by demographic, and somehow figure out that polls were overestimating support for Clinton among non-college whites (and/or figure out that social trust was correlated with vote choice in 2016 when it wasn’t in the past). Vague pontifications about “oh if you liberal elite step out of your bubble you’d understand why trump wins” don’t count :)