We were wrong.

I didn't see a Trump presidency coming. I never liked Trump, but I liked him a little more than Clinton personally. But I couldn't personally imagine that he would receive support outside the republican party. I underestimated him. I assumed that undecided voters would be split pretty evenly, which normally happens.  The polls showed Clinton would win, and the early voting data supported this.  I don't know why the polls were wrong. I don't know if I and other people  focused enough on the potential for error in our models. Maybe we sold our models as a certainty,  when there was a potential for error.   So I thought the polls were right. But they weren't.  I don't know what happened.  I don't think the polls were rigged.  Maybe people lied about their support.  Maybe Trump supporters didn't participate enough in polls.  Maybe people changed their mind suddenly after polls stopped. This isn't over.  Just because we may have failed in this election doesn't mean we going to stop predicting.  We had bad data, and statistics doesn't work on bad data. We could have made mistakes and assumptions that turn out to be incorrect.  But we will learn and grow and examine our results.

We may have made mistakes. I hope that you will understand that the failure of the predictors shouldn't mean we need to be dismissed.  I think the biggest problem we had was we focused on the data a little too much and ignored the fact that Trump overperformed in the primaries compared to the polls, and Clinton underperformed her poll numbers in the primaries.  I don't have the answers yet.  It could take years to understand what happened. But it will be studied. We will work on being better.  We will focus on creating better polls and better models.  I ask instead of dismissing us as biased or as pseudoscientists, that you would give statistics another chance.   Election prediction is a relatively new field. Give us a chance to grow.  Answer polls and help us get better data. Give us a second chance.