Election Forecasting Quotes

Let me tell you the polls that count, and those are the polls a couple of weeks before the election. That's when the pollsters worry about holding onto their credibility. Those are the polls that everybody remembers.

There was an analyst who came out the other day who's had a long track record of projecting presidential campaigns based on the economy and other kind of factors. And he said if [Donald] Trump stays about where he is right now, he'll win at about 51 or 52 percent. If Trump actually gets his act together in a disciplined way, he could win by as much as 66 percent.

I don't pay a lot of attention to polls.

Predicting voter turnout is not hard, it’s impossible.

Opinion polls are not worth the paper they are written on, in my view, through the conference season. They don't settle down again until November.

Exit polls have gone notoriously wrong in the past.

I'm a believer in the polls, by the way. Rarely do you see a poll that's very far off.

The Internet greatly facilitates betting pools called information or prediction markets that permit people to bet on the occurrence of future events. Such markets already gauge election results more accurately than polls do. If legalized and modestly subsidized, they could also foretell many policy results better than politicians or experts alone. We could then better predict the consequences of changes

The pollsters and pundits will keep trying to read voters' minds.

All the 'too close to call' announcements are not due to incompetence ... It's caution.

The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.

Why do I think the polls were wrong? People were relying on the pollsters. There was "the Brexit Effect." I think there's a Trump Effect, too. I think people are lying to the pollsters about Trump. There isn't any question about it.

Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president is going to win. Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73 — they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning. And you talk to the Romney people, it’s the same thing.

Pundits are no better at forecasting election outcomes than they would be at predicting the final path of a hurricane. Smart pundits should consider either abandoning this activity or consulting with the geeks before rendering their guesses.

Polling in a general election is pretty accurate, because turnout is usually high.

You'd think experienced political professionals would know better than to place their trust in exit polls, notoriously inaccurate surveys that had John Kerry winning the 2004 election by five points when he actually lost by three.