A big problem with thinking Hillary somehow outperformed polling (and it’s the first part in a long series of “deeply held beliefs” you must have to buy into the Hillary stole the primary conspiracy theory) is a highly selective remembrance of the aggregate polling data. The biggest actual result that aggregate polling got wrong versus the actual results, in the Democratic primaries, was Michigan–and that error favored Sanders, as Hillary was projected as having something like a 90% chance of winning a majority of the Michigan votes, and by something like a 10% margin.
The rest of the aggregate polling on state campaigns was fairly close, for primaries. Caucuses had a greater margin of error but they’ve always been that way–and caucuses again, actually favored Bernie more than Hillary.
The big things that I saw happening during the campaign that I think contributed to Bernie fans confusion was they would often conflate national polls with state polls. And they would also conflate single-off polling results with aggregate poll numbers. And they would not pay attention to the pollster. Bernie fans hated FiveThirtyEight and called it a Hillary shill site–because FiveThirtyEight kept predicting Bernie defeats, and got them right essentially every time other than Michigan (at least for primaries.)
It’s actually not super easy to get a “good” primary poll, that’s why the quality of the pollster if very important. Some polling outfits would do online polls 5 days out that would show Bernie winning. These polls had no ability to realistically filter on things like “who is actually able to vote in the upcoming primary” and “how many people in this state voted early or absentee, back when Hillary was up by 20 points?” The better polls tried to take into account early votes and who could actually vote int he primaries, but there were a lot of polls from the “bad” pollsters, some so bad FiveThirtyEight and RCP don’t even include them. If you chose to cherry pick those polls instead of the much more reliable polls from respected pollsters, that were then aggregated, then it’d have been very easy to run from one state election to the next convinced Bernie would win, and then see him losing over and over.
They also focused a lot on exit polls. Some exit polls would have a small sample size, and again are just one poll, what we’ve learned in the last 8 years or so about poll aggregating is it is much more accurate that trusting a single poll. I don’t believe a single state in the Democratic primary had multiple independent exit polls (in fact I think many didn’t have exit polls at all), and one exit poll of a few hundred election day voters has a pretty good margin of error, especially compared to a half dozen polls taken by different pollsters and given weighted values based on the quality of that pollster’s operations and other factors like the age of the poll and sample size. The oft-repeated claim that exit polls are the way to “prove” election fraud, simply isn’t true, and there is no form of polling that can be 100% reliably with only a few hundred people asked, and for exit polling we know for a fact that it suffers from things like “enthusiasm bias” (a candidate whose voters are more enthusiastic are probably more interested to stop on their way out to talk to a pollster, a less enthusiastic voter is more likely to just brush by the pollster to get home.)
So take all these misunderstandings about how polling actually went during the election, and then combine it with how States run elections. States run elections very poorly. And they frankly, always have. Not only are there essentially no national standards on running elections, there aren’t necessarily state ones, either.
Go watch the docudrama “Recount”, which is about the 2000 election recount in Florida. Or just read up on that situation. What you’ll learn is that Florida essentially had 67 different mechanisms of conducting elections, one for each county.
You know how Bernie fans were up in arms about people being purged from voters rolls? That happened to 20,000 voters or more in Florida, many of them improperly. Conspiracy to give the election to Bush? Eh, I think “Recount” actually covers it pretty well. They definitely used Katherine Harris to push their hands on the scale, but most of these problems can be found in all fifty states. Florida may actually be among the very worst in how it runs elections, and thus why it was especially unfortunate (in terms of not having a national crisis) for it to be the deciding state in a Presidential election. None of the “election problems”, be it voters being turned away, voter purges, long lines, people being sent home after a certain time even though they shouldn’t have been etc–all of those are 100% found in every election. Not just Presidential elections, but State elections too. Go back to election 2004, there were tons of articles about this same topic back then, in Ohio.
But that’s because Ohio was the last State to be decided in 2004; Ohio wasn’t special. It was just a swing state. The media usually doesn’t even focus on the deep red or blue states, but they are full of electoral cluster fucks every time people go and vote.
When you have no national standards, often times no state standards–an amazing thing about the Florida recount is how much power county canvassing boards had, with the Florida Division of Elections actually only legally able to “advise” the canvassing boards on issues like how to design a ballot or how to conduct the hand recounts, it’s simply impossible to not have elections be a clusterfuck. Frankly, I do find it both scandalous and sad that it only gets attention every four years, in a close election, and usually targeted in a few competitive states. The grim reality is every time we vote in a state or local election, we’re entering a shit-show of a process that is badly run and straight out of the 1800s.
However, to get back to this year’s election–you can’t take that shit that happens constantly and is mostly just evidence of really poorly ran elections and claim that is any kind of evidence of fraud. Some of the most prominent examples that have come out in the Democratic primary have actually been ones that likely hurt Hillary. Like the infamous voter purge not long before the election in Brooklyn, that was a heavy Hillary district, so it’s more likely than not those voters would’ve helped her, not hurt her. [Plus there’s not been any real evidence most of those voters purged had not, in fact, moved, died, or been otherwise validly removed–removal required you to miss a few consecutive elections and most people that normally vote who miss a few consecutive elections have a reason for doing so, like no longer being alive or no longer living in the precinct.]
