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2018 Governor · SD

Change Research · fieldwork ended 2018-11-03 (3 days before the election) · 851 respondents · Text-to-Web/Online Ad

The poll said

Democrat 51% · Republican 45%

D+6.0

The certified result

Democrat 47.60% · Republican 50.97%

R+3.4

The arithmetic

  1. Poll margin = 51 − 45 = 6.00
  2. Actual margin = 47.597 − 50.974 = -3.377
  3. Signed miss = 6.00 − (-3.377) = 9.378
  4. Absolute miss = |9.378| = 9.378

The poll overstated the Democrat by 9.4 points and had the wrong leader.

Where these numbers come from

Poll and result: 538 raw_polls.csv. Poll ID 56760, race ID 161 (538 database).