Trump and Brexit revealed gaping holes in political ‘reality’

Shock

In the space of a few months in 2016, two of the world’s most stable democracies delivered shocks to global politics. The vote for Britain to leave the European Union in June and Trump’s victory in November not only defied the polls but flew in the face of overwhelming certainty from media observers, the political class and financial markets.

Some attempted to justify that certainty from the polls, but it did not convince. In the United States, RCP polling average gave Clinton a margin of 3.2 percentage points by the end, which was exactly how much they got it wrong in 2012. The most accurate poll in recent cycles, the IBD/TIPP tracking poll, gave Clinton the narrowest of margins of one point (making it the most accurate in 2016 as well). Further uncertainty was raised by the spread. The last ten polls varied by some nine points, more than double the variation in 2012—from a comfortable Trump win to a Clinton landslide. State polls were somewhat misleading, but Wisconsin was the only Trump win outside the margin of error.