Polls and predictions: what has failed and what do we need to learn to read them better?

What went wrong with the polls in 2016 that they didn’t predict Donald Trump’s victory and what should we know to better understand them in such an atypical year for American politics? See here the debate with Alan Abramowitz, Mary Stegmaier, with the moderation of Pedro Magellan and David Dinis.

A debate over predictions and polls, a topic that gained particular relevance after the 2016 election, when almost all polls pointed to a clear and comfortable victory for Hillary Clinton, but the winner would eventually be Donald Trump.

To dissect these results and understand what has failed, or what we do not understand in the numbers presented to us (as well as the impact of the pandemic and the evolution of the economy), we invited two renowned American experts in the field of predictions and electoral behavior: Alan Abramowitz, Political Scientist at Emory University in Atlanta; and Mary Stegmaier, Political Scientist at Truman School of Public Affairs, from the University of Missouri.

The debate was moderated by Pedro Magalhães, principal investigator of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and also an expert in these areas, and the journalist David Dinis, deputy director of the weekly Expresso.