Republican pollster Ed Goeas said Wednesday that polls did not pick up on swing voters’ movement toward President Trump during the last week of the 2016 presidential election.
“I do think polls did get a bad rap when in fact they were saying that Hillary [Clinton] was going to win the popular vote. She won the popular vote,” Goeas, the president and CEO of the Tarrance Group, told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
“If you look at the state by state polls, the last public poll was finished the Tuesday before the Tuesday election, a week out,” he continued. “And so all the movement we were seeing in our polls was happening on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday with that 20 percent who disliked both candidates who became the swing vote, and they all moved towards Trump in the last week.”
“Saying that polls were off in 2016 because the analysis was done wrong is not correct. It was that they didn’t pick up on the fact that there were no polls in that last week when that was all the movement that was happening,” he said.
Many pollsters were criticized in 2016 after they predicted Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton would beat Trump in a landslide before winning traditionally Democratic states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The American Association for Public Opinion Research released an autopsy report on the polling failures in 2016 and found that underestimating polling in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was the biggest factor that led to incorrect results.
— Julia Manchester
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