This map shows you which parts of the country swung to the left or to the right v 2016. Georgia and sub/urban Texas really stand out to me:

economist.com/graphic-detail… Image
Ohio and Iowa are also notable for their shift to the right, which is doubly striking since the polls said they had swung so far to the left
(we are predicting results in counties that haven't fully reported totals yet)
Here is another map that shows the swing in each county _relative_ to the national swing, in other words we're removing the fact that Biden did better than Clinton overall Image
Aside from the huge swings in Hispanic-heavy counties, a clear takeaway from this map is that urban-rural polarization has gotten worse since 2016. I wrote about this today:

economist.com/graphic-detail…
Bigger chart: Image

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More from @gelliottmorris

11 Nov
Our latest YouGov/The Economist poll has a host of troubling findings about public confidence in the election.

Most shocking is that 86% of Trump voters say that Biden "did not legitimately win the election." 73% say that we'll "never know the real outcome of this election."
We also see the usual patterns in attitudes about mail-in voting and fraud. 88% of Trump voters say they believe that "illegal immigrants voted fraudulently in 2016 and tried again in 2020," for ex, and 90% believed that "mail ballots are being manipulated to favor Joe Biden."
Republicans are also exhibiting some... concerning... attitudes about the franchise, with 46% saying that "some people are not smart enough to vote" (27% among Dems) and 43% saying that people should have to pass a test before voting (15% for Dems).
Read 4 tweets
10 Nov
It is weird that so many people who rely on public polling for their jobs are instantly willing to trash the industry with damaging statements like these, instead of trying to calmly and transparently explain what went wrong and work toward better polls in the future.
Like, if part of the answer to "why aren't people taking surveys?" is "because people in the media trash them and say they are biased and aren't good for anything," then it's weird that people who know better would actively participate in the industry's demise
For posterity's sake,

(1) Here is our first cut at how the polls/models missed support for Trump, again: economist.com/united-states/…

(2) Here is what we're going to do differently next time: economist.com/united-states/…
Read 5 tweets
7 Nov
It’s way too early for headlines like this. Polls are going to end up with only slightly-above-average error once all the votes are counted. The emerging pattern of routine bias is a problem, yes, but it’s not the doomsday situation people are leading you to believe.
The biggest problem with polls TBH is that people, and lots of journalists, don’t understand how much error there can be. This is a perfectly reasonable performance for the data, yet so many in the media have already prematurely called the industry dead.
The other point is re: the “who” of the error. Based on county returns so far it looks like polls actually performed just fine in the suburbs, but underestimated support for Trump among non-college whites and maybe Hispanics. Nothing about revolt against D culture looks true.
Read 5 tweets
5 Nov
The primary use for polls is not pre-election handicapping, it's to understand what the average American wants from their government. And while election polls aren't in a good position, issue polls of all adults seem fine (for now).

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
I agree that people need to "kick the addiction" of thinking polls are infallible predictors of election outcomes. They're not, that's why we try to model what could happen if they misfire.
Separately, I have noticed this really annoying trend where a lot of the people saying we should "quit" polling are finance or quant folks who want 100% accurate predictions from them, but that's not what polls are and never will be.
Read 5 tweets
5 Nov
The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting 51k+ absentee votes left to be counted in GA, with the vast majority outstanding from Atlanta.

Biden's threshold to win is roughly 60% of those votes, which is very likely. If the AJC is correct... folks...

ajc.com/politics/about…
Some more math. Fulton County alone has 25k absentee ballots left to count. So far, Biden has won 79% of absentee votes there. IF they break similarly, Fulton alone would close Trump's margin to under 3k votes

results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/Fulton/1054…
Similar numbers in Chatham County (Savannah), where the AJC says there are 16k absentee votes to count. I have no way of verifying that, but if they split 74% Biden like the already-counted absentees votes that's a 4k vote net gain for Biden which would push his lead over Trump's
Read 4 tweets
5 Nov
I have heard these "people are not numbers" and "we are not statistics" lines a lot today, and it's unclear to me if any "numbers nerds" are actually arguing this? We pair the majority of our data-driven reporting with interviews with experts or actual voters. It's def not 100-0.
It seems to me that the people being safest with the polling data and who most often note the nuances of the processes that produce the numbers that campaigns and news orgs rely on are the data-driven journalists who actually look at the numbers every day!
It's also pretty funny to see the coalition for innumeracy out in full force today as models are on track to "call" ~50 of 51 states in the pres elec correctly, albeit with some above-avg polling error. Today says more about how J School Types consume polls than about how we do.
Read 4 tweets

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