9th Nov 2016 09:18
WASHINGTON (Alliance News) - Months after opinion polls failed to predict Britain's vote to leave the European Union, their reliability was called into question once again on Wednesday after they backed the wrong horse in the US presidential election.
Most opinion polls in the run-up to Tuesday's election had put Democrat Hillary Clinton firmly ahead of president-elect Donald Trump.
An average of national opinion surveys gave her a 2-percentage-point advantage on Monday, the day before the vote, and the liberal New York Times gave her an 84% chance of winning.
Bookmakers also backed Clinton, with FTSE 100-constituent Paddy Power Betfair PLC even paying out EUR1 million three weeks before the vote to punters who had bet on Clinton. The stock was down 1.1% at 9,080.00 pence early Wednesday.
The fiasco appeared bound to draw comparisons with the UK's Brexit vote in June, before which opinion polls - and bookmakers - also failed to forecast Brexit.
Trump himself, who has dismissed opinion polls as "crooked," appeared to indicate that he thought he would lose by repeatedly asserting that the election was "rigged" against him at his final rallies.
He tweeted on Tuesday that "Utah officials report voting machine problems across entire country."
He also repeatedly refused to say whether he would concede the vote to Clinton if she won.
"We'll see what happens," he told reporters after casting his vote in New York on Tuesday.
His tone reflected that of Nigel Farage, Britain's chief campaigner to leave the EU, who before results were in on the night of the June 23 vote conceded that it "looks like Remain will edge it."
British polling expert John Curtice on Monday had said too much attention was focused on nationwide polls, rather than the accuracy of individual state polls.
"The winner in a state takes all of its electoral college votes irrespective of the narrowness of their victory," he wrote in a column for UK newspaper The Independent.
In the end, Trump triumphed in key swing states including Florida Pennsylvania and Ohio, sending Clinton supporters into shock and world stock markets downward.
As Trump himself put it at a rally in North Carolina the day before the election, "It's going to be Brexit plus, plus, plus."
Copyright dpa
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