In forecasting the 2016 election result, modelers had a good year. Pollsters did not.

For most commentators and pollsters, Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election came as a sharp surprise. Charles Tien and Michael S. Lewis-Beck examine how political science modelers performed in their election predictions compared to poll aggregators and to the national polls. When looking at Hillary Clinton’s share of the two-party vote, they find that political science models were the most accurate in their forecasts. The national polls, by contrast, were largely outside of the margin of error in their predictions for both Clinton and Donald Trump’s share of the popular vote.