To the editor: Robin Abcarian’s column on preelection polls was another excellent piece from her.
What people forget is that in 2016, most of the major polls were essentially correct. Those polls did not predict Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton winning that election; they only reflected the fact that she was ahead by about 3.5 points just prior to election day. Furthermore, those polls were taken before then-FBI Director James Comey’s October surprise was fully baked in.
It should also be remembered that Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, but she lost the electoral college vote to Donald Trump.
What’s also interesting about 2016 was the conventional wisdom that one of the only correct major polls was the USC/L.A. Times poll, which had Clinton losing by a little more than three points. In other words, according to the conventional wisdom, a poll that was off by more than five percentage points was correct, while the other polls that on average missed by about 1.5 points were wrong.
Poll derangement syndrome indeed.
Fred Gober, Playa Vista
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To the editor: The 2016 polls were gut-wrenchingly wrong. However, I was not surprised when Clinton lost.
I voted for her and wanted her to win, but when she referred to a large number of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables,” I cringed at the wholesale lack of respect that implied. It may have been meant to be clever, but it led to something worse than just political disagreements; those words fractured “we the people” into “us versus them.”
And then came the conspiracy theories and attempts to dismantle our democracy with threats and lies.
There’s a saying that it’s easy to fool people, but it’s darn near impossible to convince them that they have been fooled. Yet I can see that many Americans on both sides of the fence are willing to dispense with our differences and work toward protecting our democracy and freedoms, because we love our country and our families.
Ina Scott, Lancaster
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To the editor: Abcarian missed an important point.
The premise of her piece was that political polls have become unreliable in the most recent election cycles. She cited the fact that polls had Clinton way ahead of Trump in 2016, just before she lost the election. Polls in 2020 had President Biden much farther ahead of Trump than the actual vote tally.
Her explanation for these discrepancies was the failure of pollsters to parse out education levels among white voters. I think it’s much simpler.
I think there is a large block of allegedly “undecided” voters who are simply too embarrassed to admit to a pollster that they intend to vote for an orange-faced, felonious candidate.
Dean Simpson, Visalia, Calif.