Holy hell. What a turn in U.S. history. And we didn’t even see it coming—because the polls were way, way off, as they were in 2014. We found ourselves facing vote margins in the presidential race that were 5, 10, even 14 points off from our final Daily Kos Elections polling average margin. The miss, on average, was a little under 5 points too rosy for Hillary Clinton on the margin. That will probably improve a little as more ballots are counted, but not that much.
What’s remarkable, as the graph at the top of this post shows, is that the polling average miss was almost universally in Trump’s favor—those are the dots below the green line. Polls often miss, but almost always, some misses favor one party and some favor the other. The uniformity of the misses here is striking. Want further details to obsess over and distract you? Read on.