FOR Hillary Clinton, losing Michigan’s Democratic primary to Bernie Sanders was a nuisance. For pollsters, in contrast, the election was Armageddon. Eight different firms had surveyed the state in the previous month, and every one gave Mrs Clinton a double-digit lead. According FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism website that had put Mrs Clinton’s chances of victory at greater than 99%, the 23-percentage-point gap between her average lead in the polls and the final result was the biggest error since Gary Hart’s victory in the 1984 New Hampshire Democratic primary.
What went wrong? To produce a misfire of this magnitude, just about everything. Pollsters both underestimated how favourable the electorate would be to Mr Sanders—according to the exit poll, it was younger, more male and included more independents than expected—and how big a share of each group he would capture. He lost black voters by merely a 2.4-to-one margin, half as big as his shortfalls among African-Americans in the South. And he limited his deficit among voters who earn more than $100,000 to three percentage points (it was 36 in Virginia).
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