On Nov. 2, six days before the general election, the political world paused to watch a live stream from the campus of Marquette Law School in Milwaukee. Charles Franklin, director of the school’s election poll, talked through the release of its final numbers. After days of awful headlines about the FBI probe of her email server, Hillary Clinton had held onto her lead, and enjoyed a 44-37 percent advantage over Donald Trump.
“Concern about Clinton’s use of a private email system does not appear to have shifted much in the wake of the FBI news,” Franklin said.
That, it seemed, was that. The poll was the “gold standard” for Wisconsin, having nailed the results of the 2012 and 2014 elections. A planned Trump rally in Wisconsin was canceled; the candidate stumped in Minnesota instead. On Election Day, FiveThirtyEight’s poll-based review of Wisconsin gave Trump only a 16.5 percent chance of winning the state.
When Trump did win it, Franklin was not in Wisconsin. He was in New York, aiding ABC News on its election decision desk, and watched the entire Midwest swing toward Donald Trump by a greater margin than any poll had suggested. In most of Wisconsin, Trump was outperforming the poll by six points; in the Milwaukee suburbs, where he was supposed to be unusually weak, he ran ahead of the poll by 10 points.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member