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2018 House · VA-5

The New York Times/Siena College · fieldwork ended 2018-10-19 (18 days before the election) · 501 respondents · Live Phone

The poll said

Democrat 45.62% · Republican 44.59%

D+1.0

The certified result

Democrat 46.65% · Republican 53.18%

R+6.5

The arithmetic

  1. Poll margin = 45.62 − 44.59 = 1.03
  2. Actual margin = 46.648 − 53.176 = -6.528
  3. Signed miss = 1.03 − (-6.528) = 7.559
  4. Absolute miss = |7.559| = 7.559

The poll overstated the Democrat by 7.6 points and had the wrong leader.

Where these numbers come from

Poll and result: 538 raw_polls.csv. Poll ID 56309, race ID 572 (538 database).