Donald Trump last week won every battleground state and cruised to an electoral victory. “Top” data experts and pollsters didn’t see it coming.
Trump’s big win should serve as a lesson for those who blindly trust the “experts,” whether pollsters or government bureaucrats who wield control over the budget and the economy.
The worst 2024 high-profile polling miss—by 16 points—came from the pollster who the media establishment put on the highest pedestal, Ann Selzer, whose 2012 polling for The Des Moines Register famously foreshadowed Barack Obama’s upset of Mitt Romney in Iowa.
Politico and others referred to Selzer’s polling as the “gold standard.” Clare Malone of ABC News’ FiveThirtyEight wrote a particularly gushing feature on Selzer in 2016, saying:
When Homer wrote of his hero Odysseus, he was ‘that godlike man.’ The D.C. poets use…
