The popular vote is what was within the margin of

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The popular vote is what was within the margin of error:

Survey researchers expressed varying levels of concern Wednesday about the significance of polling inaccuracies and theories on the causes. “The final high quality scientific RDD landline/cellphone national polls consistently overestimated Clinton’s share of the vote by 3 or 4 percentage points,” Jon Krosnick said in an email. Krosnick is a professor of political science at Stanford University and a widely respected expert on survey methods.

“That’s a systematic error but not huge.” (Update: Final vote counts show the average of national polls overestimated Clinton’s share of the two-party vote by about one percentage point.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/w...49a4a8d198

Krosnick said he was not surprised by the inaccuracy of state polls, reasoning that “most state polls are not scientific — either they involve volunteer respondents instead of randomly sampled respondents, or they involve automated calling to landlines only, omitted cellphone only people.”

Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray expressed greater concern about the way polls missed Trump’s support. “There’s a significant anti-establishment mood that polls didn’t catch — it caught some of it but not all of it,” Murray said in an interview Wednesday. “We might come to a conclusion that polls lose their precise predictive power and are best as general gauges of the mood of the electorate instead of predicting electoral outcomes.”

The causes of polling errors are typically hazy in the immediate wake of election results, due in no small part to votes continuing to be tallied well after Election Day. But even with incomplete data, it’s worth assessing how much polls differed from results and why they led to a surprising result.

An analysis of 145 polls nationally and in 16 states completed within one week of the election shows a number of interesting results. The magnitude of national and state survey errors was not far from historical levels; the more troublesome dynamic was that errors systematically overestimated Clinton’s vote margin against Trump, leading to parallel errors that did not catch a number of key states moving into Trump’s column.

Clinton won the national popular vote by two percentage points according to certified vote tallies compiled by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. Most individual surveys found Clinton holding a small single-digit edge over Trump, averaging to a three-point margin. Looking across individual national polls, the average difference from the final Clinton-Trump vote margin is 2.2 percentage points, much smaller than the level of error apparent when they were compared to preliminary vote results (3.4 points).

The National Council on Public Polls (NCPP for short) has analyzed the accuracy of national surveys dating back to the 1930s, using a metric called “candidate error,” which is the difference between the winning candidate’s margin over the losing candidate minus a poll’s margin, then divided by two.

The average candidate error in national polls for 2016 is 1.1, slightly lower than in 2012 (1.5) and just slightly higher than 2008 and 2004 (0.9 each) The overall size of errors this year is just below the average since 1992 (1.3) and about half the all-time average of 2.2. National poll error in the infamous 1948 election polls was nearly five times as large as 2016 (5 points).

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