Media pundits and pollsters were left with red faces after Donald Trump moved towards a comfortable victory in the US presidential election.
Most media commentators have repeatedly said the US election was “too close to call” and all opinion polls had predicted an extremely close result on election night.
The polls had largely predicted a narrow Kamala Harris victory in the popular vote with varying predictions on whether Harris or Trump would win the electoral college.
Instead, Trump appears to have won a comfortable victory in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Opinion polls similarly failed to predict Trump’s previous election victory in 2016, instead favouring Hillary Clinton.
The Rest Is Politics podcast host Rory Stewart said this week he was “utterly convinced” Kamala Harris would win the election and even went as far as to say the bookmakers had it wrong by making Trump the favourite and saying he would bet £1,000 on the vice president.
This morning he said: “When a result happens you rewrite history. If she was currently winning we would have a very good answer for why she was winning.”
Most of his fellow hosts on The Rest Is Politics US Election Livestream – Marina Hyde, Anthony Scaramucci and Alastair Campbell – also predicted a Kamala Harris win. Only fellow host historian Dominc Sandbrook correctly predicted a Trump win.
At time of writing, the Rest Is Politics US Election Livestream had racked up more than one million views on Youtube.
Sun political editor Harry Cole said on The Sun’s Never Mind the Ballots video show that “pundits went so out for Harris for no other reason than it made themselves feel better and they could just sleep better at night and they look like [expletive beeped] now don’t they?
“There was no reason for pundits to go so hard on Harris when you could look at the fundamentals, it wasn’t there, the concerns about the polls from 2016 and from 2020 were there. The polls have completely skewed the coverage of the election.”
Daily Mail columnist Andrew Neil said on 3 November: “This election started as a dead heat and it’s got even closer… You’re talking about a couple of thousand votes in each swing state could make the difference.”
On the same day Rory Stewart said: “This won’t be a close race decided by a ‘couple of thousand votes’. He is wrong. And Kamala Harris will win.”
Pennsylvania was expected to be the closest swing state, but at time of writing Trump was predicted to have won it with a relatively comfortable margin of over two percentage points, or nearly 200,000 votes.
Polling expert and founder of Five Thirty Eight Nate Silver said on Tuesday he had run 80,000 models and the election was “literally closer than a coin flip” on the eve of the poll but on his simulations Harris was slightly more likely to win than Trump. In the 2016 US election his website Five Thirty Eight wrongly predicted a Hillary Clinton victory.
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