OPINION VERSUS OUTCOME
Brexit and Trump: has predictability gone up the poll?
After the Brexit and Trump surprises, pollsters are now flagging a variety of impediments to accurate prediction, writes Anthony Butler
It has been widely, and rather uncharitably, remarked that the surprise victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections has dealt a blow to the credibility of opinion pollsters. The Trump shock came hot on the heels of the Brexit debacle in the UK, in which most pollsters wrongly called the outcome of a historic referendum. But these results were not the "black swans" beloved of market gurus: Brexit and Trump victories lay well inside the bounds of conceivability. Indeed, proxy measures of uncertainty, such as the price of insurance against financial market swings, showed that market actors were well aware that either outcome was possible. Nevertheless, a wide variety of survey methods, analytical models and statistical techniques were at least partially confounded by the outcomes. So too were analyses based on "predictive markets" — financial and currency markets that ostensibly price in all available information. The polling industry and the intellectual champions of the ...
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