Democrats and liberals in media are learning far too late that the working class was the key to the 2016 election. They have also finally figured out that the exit polling was massively flawed.
The New York Times reports:
The 2016 Exit Polls Led Us to Misinterpret the 2016 Election
Crucial disputes over Democratic strategy concerning economic distribution, race and immigration have in large part been based on Election Day exit polls that now appear to have been inaccurate in key ways.
According to subsequent studies, those polls substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters — many of whom are culturally conservative — and overestimated the white college-educated Democratic electorate, a far more culturally liberal constituency.
“The short answer is that the exit polls are wrong,” Matthew DeBell, a senior scholar at Stanford’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, emailed me. He continued:
In November 2016, 31.9 percent of adult US citizens had college degrees, according to the Current Population Survey. There were 138.8 million votes. To reach 50 percent of all voters, the turnout rate among college grads would have to have been 97 percent. This doesn’t pass the laugh test; no credible study has ever found turnout rates that high.
The Pew Research Center and the Center for American Progress have produced methodologically sophisticated surveys of the electorate that sharply contradict 2016 exit polls.
Whether or not Democrats will learn anything from all this remains to be seen.
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