This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 16, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

The blue wave didn't happen this election, and polling voters was again a total mess.

Polsters at least predicted the outcome correctly even though it could have easily gone the

other way.

Emily Ekins directs polling at the Cato Institute, we discussed the so-called shy Trump voter,

what the aggregate election results can tell us about the mood of the electorate.

This was a weird election. as we were we were talking before we started recording here in

2016 and 2020 and you include Brexit. The polls were off in a consistent direction and that should

really tell us something. So what does that tell us? Well I think that

these elections are more connected than some of us have realized, but I think what's

important is to kind of take a step back and think about what did we expect to happen.

So polls overall did tell us the right direction of the presidential election that

Biden was going to win, that was accurate.

If we look at our friends at 538 that our poll aggregators and modelers, you know,

they accurately predicted most of kind of the general direction of where things went. But here was what was

surprising. People thought it was going to be an early night that Biden was

leading, you know, seven, eight, maybe nine nine maybe ten points nationally and then in these

battleground states it was maybe a little bit narrower but there were some

polls like the ABC Washington Post poll of the state of Wisconsin showed Biden up by 17 points.

In Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin when it was actually like fairly a point now we still are having ballots coming in you know so there some of these

these total will change but the point is is that these polls

...