THE PERILS OF POLLING – AT 12:38 P.M. ET:  We publish regular warnings here about becoming too dependent on a single poll, or even a series of polls.  That warning is emphasized by an excellent piece on polling at The Hill:

Virtually all the opinion polls right now give Hillary Clinton a firm lead over Donald Trump in the race for the White House this November. The latest poll average compiled by RealClearPolitics puts her at least five points ahead of Trump, with or without Gary Johnson and Jill Stein included as choices; the Huffington Post Pollster projects a better than 99-percent chance that “Clinton is very likely leading;” and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives her an 85 percent chance of winning.

It looks like the race is decided.

But that was the same sentiment that led the major pollsters 68 years ago to stop polling several weeks before the 1948 election. Tom Dewey’s lead was so firm and consistent that there was no way Harry Truman would be able to win. At least, so it seemed. The man from Missouri did win, of course, thrust to victory by a late surge of votes sparked by his whistle-stop campaign.

If, as Harold Wilson’s once said, a week in politics is an eternity, what do we call three weeks left until Election Day? More than ample time to squander a lead or to catch up.

Polling would never again be suspended weeks before Election Day, no matter how big the lead in the polls. Yet this has not proved to be a guarantee that polls would get it right in the end.

In the most recent presidential election, Gallup’s final estimate of likely voters, issued on the eve of Election Day in 2012, projected Mitt Romney as the winner. A day later, Obama was the winner by nearly 4 percentage points.

Soon after this debacle the Gallup Organization, the inventor of scientific polling in the 1930’s, fell on its sword and quit the election horse-race business altogether. Rasmussen got it wrong in 2012 as well, but they opted to stay in the business.

But in all fairness to those polling giants, they weren’t alone. Three pollsters wimped out, projecting a tied vote, and of the four remaining polls on the RealClearPolitics summary, only two predicted an Obama victory, and those two did so with minimal confidence.

COMMENT:   Read the whole piece.  There could still be surprises and turns of luck.  On the other hand, luck is often created by skillful candidates.  Do any names pop up?

October 16, 2016