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How the 'L.A. Times' poll was the only one to predict a Trump win

2025-04-27 07:04:31admin

A Donald Trump presidency has arrived — a possibility almost no major pollster saw coming. Except the Los Angeles Times.

The USC Dornsife/L.A. TimesDaybreak poll predicted what pretty much everyone else saw as a distant and unlikely reality. Leading into Election Day, the poll was predicting a Trump win.

SEE ALSO:Nearly half of Americans didn't vote — not even for Harambe

That made it a lone wolf, as most other pollsters predicted a Hillary Clinton win. A week before the election, Trump's lead was already solid in the L.A. Timespoll.

And his lead didn't waver much in the following days, as the poll continued to forecast a Trump presidency.

So what about all the other outlets, from CNN to the New York Times? What did they miss that the L.A. Times didn't?

To put it simply: a collection of data that most other polls never looked at, according to an expert.

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The USC/LATpoll measured a voter's faith in a candidate on a 1-100 scale, something not seen in most other polls giving limited choices. A day ahead of Trump's victory, Dan Schnur wrote a Timesop-ed that explained this crucial difference.

"Whereas most polls simply ask voters to choose between alternatives," Schnur wrote, "the Daybreak poll attempts to determine the intensity of voter preferences by asking how committed a respondent is to his or her candidate (on a scale of 1 to 100)."

Measuring the actual level of commitment voters have is essential, according to Schnur.

"Few voters shift their support on an absolute basis — from total and complete certainty for one candidate to equally unequivocal certainty for the other," he wrote, adding that most voters change their minds gradually.

This is why it's important to gauge voters' opinions over time, rather than using the "traditional all-or-nothing surveys" that exist in many polls, Schnur said.

People have explained away how everyone could've been so wrong about Trump's victory with other reasons, too. Some pollsters have suggested demographics were relied on too much in predicting election results, while others said the key voting bloc of working class white voters wasn't polled enough.

Mashable ImageVoters stretch a block long along 3rd Street to vote at the Northern Liberties Community Center on Election Day in Philadelphia, PA on Nov. 8, 2016. Credit: David Maialetti/Philadelphia Inquirer via AP

And some said it was just denial, from major media and others who just couldn't fathom Trump winning.

“Most of the press and folks in DC were science deniers when it came to this election,” Curt Anderson, a pro-Trump super PAC adviser, told Politico. “Even in the face of polls that showed it very close, they all said that Trump had almost no chance. It was because they couldn’t imagine it happening ... they are in a bubble, and that bubble has just been burst."Interestingly, the editorial Schnur wrote ahead of the election called out the backlash the Daybreak poll received from a wide swath of politicos. With the poll predicting a Trump win, Schnur said analysts grew critical of it, something he said reflected personal political views rather than objective analysis.

"The most appropriate response to the Daybreak poll should not be to dismiss it because it reveals something unfamiliar and potentially disagreeable, but rather to study it and learn from it so the science of public opinion research can move forward," Schnur wrote.

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