This page lists nationwide public opinion polls that have been conducted relating to the 2016 United States presidential election. The two major party candidates were chosen at the Democratic National Convention and Republican National Convention in July 2016.
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Donald Trump won the general election of Tuesday, November 8, 2016 despite being behind in nearly all opinion polls. Media analysts differ as to why the polling industry was unable to correctly forecast the result. Two daily tracking polls, the UPI/CVoter poll and the University of Southern California/Los Angeles Times poll were the only polls that often predicted a Trump popular vote victory or showed a nearly tied election. Trump ultimately lost the popular vote while winning the electoral college.
Aggregate polls
Poll numbers verified as of November 8, 2016.
Post election analysis
BBC News questioned whether polling should be abandoned due to its abject failure. Forbes magazine contributor astrophysicist Ethan Siegel performed a scientific analysis and raised whether the statistical population sampled for the polling was inaccurate, and cited the cautionary adage "Garbage in, garbage out". He concluded there may have been sampling bias on the part of the pollsters. Siegel compared the 2016 election to the failure of prognosticator Arthur Henning in the "Dewey Defeats Truman" incident from the 1948 presidential election.
A particular case was the USC/Los Angeles Times Daybreak tracking poll, which was different from other polls as it had Donald Trump in the lead more often than not. The poll’s findings caused skepticism, especially from Democrats, who have denounced it and often criticized the LA Times for running it. Before the election, Nate Silver deemed as positive the poll allowed people to assign themselves a probability of voting for either candidate instead of saying they’re 100 percent sure and stated that if people are "going to browbeat a pollster, [let's] do it to a pollster who is doing things cheaply—some of the robopolls qualify—and not one that’s trying to move the ball forward, like the LA Times poll." The LA Times concluded after the preliminary results of the election were published: "That doesn't necessarily mean that a poll conducted online, the way the Daybreak poll is, necessarily will be more accurate than polls conducted by phone. But it is yet another indication that polling needs more, diverse ways to look at public opinion, not fewer."