Before the votes were counted this week, almost all political journalists, pundits and apparatchiks were convinced that Hillary Clinton would be America's first female president.
As voting booths closed on the country's east coast, The New York Times' data-analytics team said Mrs Clinton had more than an 85 per cent chance of winning. The Republican Party's pollster himself, Frank Luntz, told Twitter readers: "In case I wasn't clear enough from my previous tweets: Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States." Mr Luntz had plenty of company: many others made bold, definitive – and ultimately wrong – statements they later regretted.
Voters wait in line to cast their ballots in San Francisco.Credit:Bloomberg
The near-universal failure to predict Donald Trump's triumph confounded many. This is, after all, the age of constant polling. Political parties use pollsters regularly to test voters' reactions to policies and to personalities. Media outlets in Australia report on polls fortnightly; in the US, far more frequently. Polling shapes our political landscape significantly, often well before a single vote has been cast.
Yet while polling is more frequent, and more consequential, than ever, it has become less accurate. Polling firms traditionally rely on landline phone directories to find representative samples of the populations they were canvassing. Today, fewer people, especially younger people, have a landline phone. And even fewer have the inclination to answer patiently a researcher's questionnaire.
This "dirtying" of population samples is problematic enough for Australian pollsters. But there's an even greater challenge in the US: relatively few Americans vote. Pollsters may be able to paint a relatively accurate picture (within their margins of error) of how potential voters would vote, yet they can't be certain that the people whose views they canvass will attend a voting booth on election day.
Indeed, just over half of eligible Americans voted in this year's presidential election; about 11 in every 20. It says much about the lackadaisical nature of the US electorate that so few bothered to exercise their democratic right (and responsibility) after such a heated, divisive campaign. Yet the turnout, very low by some Western nations' standards, was relatively high for the US.
The "greatest democracy in the world" just doesn't do elections very well. Its ballot methods, which vary among states, are at times antiquated, unreliable and subject to periodic legal challenges. (The "hanging chad" in Florida in 2000 was merely one, high-profile case among many.) Rival parties often file lawsuits to disenfranchise voters; even this week, supporters of Mr Trump tried to shut down some east coast polling booths that had extended their opening hours to accommodate large queues. Then there are the quirks of the US electoral college system, which creates a presidential vote outcome that doesn't always reflect the popular vote (as happened this year and in 2000).
At various times in US history, Native Americans, blacks, immigrants, women, the poor, Jews, Quakers and Catholics were not allowed to vote. Yet that great nation's citizens now spurn the suffrage for which many of their ancestors fought. Rather than attempt to "export" democracy around the world, Americans need to focus on how they can improve their own. They could do far worse than "import" Australia's compulsory-voting regime, for a start, which is far more democratic than the disengaged mess the US has become.
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