On November 5, 2016 — just three days before Election Day — the Princeton Election Consortium at Princeton University released results from a survey indicating that Hillary Clinton had a 99% chance of winning the presidency. The survey results raised doubts among some esteemed pollsters, but they also reinforced a lot of common sense about Clinton’s inevitability.
Evidence that Clinton was going to be America’s 45th President was plentiful. For one, Republicans were supposedly concerned. A theme that emerged early in Trump’s 18-month campaign was that Republicans were worried Trump would be an albatross around the whole party’s neck come November.
Polling seemed to validate their concerns. Throughout the last few months of the election season, Clinton was considered the likely winner against Donald Trump. Though Trump showed some strength in various national opinion polls in September, the tide had turned decisively by October. Most of the reputable polls, including aggregate polls, had Clinton up by 2–5 points in the last 6 weeks before the election, and some of the polls gave her as large as a 15-point advantage by the end of the month. The day before the election, CNN’s Political Prediction Market put Clinton’s chances of winning at 91%.
To read the full story, visit: https://medium.com/@ryan.skinnell/rhetoric-inevitability-and-the-behavior-of-voters-6a757b3e3a24
