U.S. President-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak at his election night rally in Manhattan, New York, U.S., November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
A handful of small public opinion polling companies that bucked consensus and accurately called the U.S. presidential election for Republican Donald Trump are reporting being flooded with calls from investors and clients seeking their services.
Most pollsters wrongly forecast Democrat Hillary Clinton as leading Trump ahead of Tuesday's election in the latest fiasco to hit the $20 billion public opinion research industry, only months after it failed to predict the British vote to leave the European Union in a June referendum.
Among the few that got it right was a new industry player using a different method, South African firm Brandseye, which analyzes social media posts.
With offices in Capetown and Johannesburg, Brandseye took an entirely different approach from traditional polling.
The data-miner pays people around the world to sift through social media for relevant posts, a process known as crowd-sourcing, and then uses a computer algorithm to rate consumer sentiment about products or politicians.
Its method pointed to a Trump victory. It also correctly called Britain's Brexit vote.
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Previous Post: The Polls On The U.S. Presidential Election Were Completely Wrong (November 9, 2016).
WNU Editor: The problem with today`s polls is that they also reflect the biases and prejudices of the pollsters themselves. As I have mentioned more than once on this blog .... on important issues I always follow the methodology and the format that is used by pollsters in assessing public opinion .... but in this election cycle .... I will be blunt .... what they were doing (i.e. their guidelines, the population sample that they were using, the huge expectation of a large Democrat turnout at the voting booth) made no sense.
