How soon we forget, and Gelman and Azari did not mention what baseball legend and language master Yogi Berra would have reminded us regarding the 2016 election polling: (1) “It’s ‘de ja vu’ all over again!” And (2) “...But the similarities are different!” (see Shapiro 2017a). This election hearkened back to the 1936 and especially the 1948 elections in which pollsters—as both pollsters and pundits—demonstrated unadulterated arrogance or hubris. In 1936 the folks atThe LiteraryDigestmagazine flaunted the prediction based on their multiple million ballot straw poll (that had been mailed to their subscribers and names from telephone, car registration and other lists—which had a distinctively upper status bias) that Alfred Landon would defeat President Franklin Roosevelt. The poll had gotten the winner right in every election from 1916 through FDR in 1932, so what could go wrong? Everything, thanks to the political realignment in which lower status voters missed in the straw poll disproportionately broke toward the Democrat Roosevelt. That year the more “scientific” (that is, engaging in something closer, but still far from, probability sampling) pollsters George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley predicted an easy Roosevelt victory and put theDigest to shame (it went out of business not long afterward). But Crossley and Gallup—who was then and still is themost famous of the lot—still underestimatedRoosevelt’s vote (60.7%) by fully 7 percentage points (compared to the Digest’s 20 points), and Gallup continued to underestimate Roosevelt’s vote in the next two election. So something was still amiss in the polls. The question of poll accuracy during this time, as the pollsters announced their predictions, got some attention, including calls for congressional investigation of the polls (on this forgotten and not well-remembered point, see especially Fried (2012)

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我们从2016年大选中学到的东西：关于盖尔曼和阿扎里的评论

我们有多快忘记了，盖尔曼和阿扎里没有提及棒球传奇人物和语言大师尤吉·贝拉（Yogi Berra）会提醒我们有关2016年大选的事情：（1）“又是'ja ja vu'了！” （2）“ ...但是相似之处不一样！” （请参阅Shapiro 2017a）。这次选举的历史可以追溯到1936年，尤其是1948年的选举，民意测验人员（既是民意测验专家，又是民意测验专家）表现出了无懈可击的傲慢或自负。1936年，《文学文摘》杂志的编辑们根据他们数百万的选票民意测验（该测验已邮寄给其订户以及电话，汽车登记和其他清单的名称，这些人的身分明显偏高）夸大了这一预测，阿尔弗雷德·兰登将击败总统富兰克林·罗斯福。从1916年到1932年的罗斯福（FDR），民意测验使每次选举的获胜者正确无误，那么可能出什么问题了？一切都得益于政治上的调整，在这种政治调整中，低级选民在稻草投票中错过的人数过多地冲向了罗斯福。那年，民意测验师乔治·盖洛普（George Gallup），埃尔莫·罗珀（Elmo Roper）和阿奇博尔德·克罗斯利（Archibald Crossley）更加“科学”（也就是说，从事更接近但仍远离概率抽样的调查）预测罗斯福轻松获胜，并使《摘要》蒙羞（它倒闭了）不久之后）。但是克罗斯利和盖洛普（当时仍然是最出名的人）仍然低估了罗斯福的选票（60.7％）整整7个百分点（相比《摘要》的20分），盖洛普在接下来的两次选举中继续低估了罗斯福的选票。因此，民意测验中仍然有些不对劲。随着民意测验人员宣布其预测，此期间的民意测验准确性问题引起了一些关注，其中包括呼吁国会对民意测验进行调查（关于这一被遗忘且未被充分记住的观点，尤其是Fried（2012））。