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by Theodore de Macedo Soares

According to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI, and FL) in the 2016 Presidential Election that she went on to lose in the computerized vote counts. With these states Clinton wins the Electoral College with a count of 306 versus 232 for Trump. Clinton also won the national exit poll by 3.2% and won the national vote count by 2.1% or about three million votes.

Exit polls were conducted in 28 states. In 22 states the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote count favored Trump. In 12 of these states the discrepancies favoring Trump exceeded the margin of error of the state’s exit poll. See Table and its footnotes below.

Readers may find the following answers to questions in the comments section very helpful:

[1] Exit polls (EP) conducted by Edison Research and published by CNN shortly after the closing of state polls and downloaded by TdMS. Edison Research conducted one national EP and EPs in 28 states. As these first published exit polls are altered/adjusted to conform to the unverified computer vote counts, the discrepancies shown above are adjusted to near zero in the final EPs.

[2] Official 2016 Presidential General Election Results. Federal Election Commission. January 30, 2017. Available at: www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2016/2016presgeresults.pdf and archived HERE.

[3] The margin columns subtracts the Clinton totals from Trump’s. A Trump win is shown by a positive sign and a Clinton win by a negative sign.

[4] Note that the Margin of Error (MOE) is for the differences between the two candidates (at 95% CI). This MOE is about double the usual MOE for each candidate. MOE calculated according to: Franklin, C. The ‘Margin of Error’ for Differences in Polls. University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. October 2002, revised February 2007. Available at: https://abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/MOEFranklin.pdf

Note: The exit poll vote proportions for Clinton and Trump were derived from the gender category (all the other categories would have approximately the same result). Clinton’s proportion of the male vote was multiplied with the total male proportion and added to Clinton’s proportion of the female vote multiplied with the total female vote to arrive at Clinton’s vote share in the state. The same procedure was applied to arrive at Trump’s proportions of the exit poll vote.

Updates:

May 8, 2017: Table updated with the official vote count published by the Federal Election Commission on January 30, 2017. The table is now marked final. Some of the introductory text has been modified in accordance with the official results and table.

November 14, 2016: As requested by a few people attached is the zip file (very large at 5,300KB) containing all the exit polls downloaded from CNN shortly after the polls closed in each state. If using these files please credit www.tdmsresearch.com and Theodore de Macedo Soares as the source and most importantly cite the article that shows the results of the exit polls: https://tdmsresearch.com/2016/11/10/2016-presidential-election-table/

November 17, 2016: The table below was updated to reflect the most current vote counts. Electoral College count updated to include states not previously decided. Michigan results will not be formally decided until the end of November but as it is expected that Trump will win its 16 Electoral College votes it has been noted as a Trump win. Electoral College results calculated with the interactive map at http://www.270towin.com/

COMMENT SECTION FUNCTIONALITY UPDATED ON NOVEMBER 19, 2016.

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