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BIAS ALERT:

ob•scu•ran•tism 

noun

: the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or full details of something from becoming known

WORD OF

THE DAY:


“There’s a new king of the presidential election data mountain. His name is Sam Wang”

- Jeff Nesbit



“Wang is a professor of neuroscience at Princeton?  Yikes.  Remind me to never participate in any brain studies there. ;-)”




“News Flash: the New York Times did everything in its power to make the odds seem so long that Republicans would give up hope and stay home on Election Day.  IMHO.”



“Nesbit is about as wrong as you can be, and yet 23,000 people share the post.  Scary-high lemming-factor.”




“Anyone surprised?  Seriously?  Very few consider Huffington Post a legit news site. They’re more a newsletter for the Complaining Class.  And this just proves it.”


November 16, 2016


Yup, we know.  “Worst” is a harsh term.  But it’s difficult to find a better modifier to describe the poor performance of these pollsters.


Some feel these polling “experts” are just simply not very good at their jobs.  Others say they are practitioners of bias, trying to influence the vote (perhaps by suggesting a foregone conclusion, demoralizing the other side, etc.).


We’ll do what we always do: let you decide. 

BiasWatch.org announces

“The Worst Pollsters of the 2016 Election”

#3

The New York Times / Josh Katz + Upshot

#1

HuffPost / Natalie Jackson

“The HuffPost presidential forecast model gives Democrat Hillary Clinton a 98.2 percent chance of winning.”

- Natalie Jackson, 11/7/16

#2

Princeton EC / Sam Wang PhD

“The PEC approach gives a probability of more like 95%” for Clinton.

- Sam Wang, PhD 11/6/16

Bonus Category

Worst polling commentator of 2016:

Jeff Nesbit / Wired & ClimateNexus

From the BiasWatch staff

Bias Alert!

a citizen-sourced news site  |   contact, comment, & submit


Worst polling commentator of 2016:

Honorable Mention: Albert R. Hunt

“Uh, actually, I’d say the case for Hunt being a fair-minded journalist is the loser.”




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“I read that the HuffPost pollster team is all-female.  That angers me.  Women’s Lib didn’t fight for decades so HuffPost could replace one bias with another.”


Honorable Mention:

Chuck Todd, NBC

“This college-educated white voter... in our last poll, Hillary Clinton was winning them by ten points... if she is winning them by ten points, this could be an early night, and this could be a much bigger victory than any of the polls have shown.”


- Chuck Todd, when asked which demo he was watching closely on Election Night 11/8/16


“Thanks for being so fair and dispassionate, Chuck.  And not letting any of your wishful thinking enter into the equation.  :-P”



“He thought Hillary was going to have an even bigger victory than the polls showed?  Perfect. That’s NBC for you.  A misinformation factory.”




COMMENTS


“Love that Wired classifies this one under ‘Science.’ ”





Honorable Mention:

Larry Sabato, UVA


“Bummed.  I used to like Sabato.”




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