Polling Controversy
Some post-election debate focused on the alleged flaws in the pre-election polls, almost all of which overstated Clinton's lead over Dole, some by a substantial margin. For example, a CBS/New York Times poll overstated Clinton's lead by 10 points despite having an error margin of 2.4%. The odds against this sort of error occurring were 15,000:1. A less extreme example was a Pew poll which overstated Clinton's lead by 5 points, the chances of this happening were 10:1 against. Gerald Wasserman, having examined eight pre-election polls, argued that pure chance would produce such a skewed result in favor of Clinton only once in 4,900 elections. However, because Clinton won the election by a comfortable margin, there was no major reaction towards the inaccuracy of the polls. The polls were also less inaccurate than the overwhelming majority of those taken in 1948, which predicted that losing candidate Thomas Dewey would beat President Harry Truman by a comfortable margin, and in 1980, which predicted that Reagan would win without a landslide victory.
Read more about this topic: United States Presidential Election, 1996
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“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)