2017 French Presidential Election

[Frelga]

Well at least math still works.

[Griffon64]

Frelga! Thanks for the smile. It is always comforting to know math still works.

[Dave_LF]

Except the polls underestimated Macron's support by more than 10 points. It was a worse miss than Brexit or Trump, they just happened to get the winner right.

[Beutlin]

Except the polls underestimated Macron's support by more than 10 points. It was a worse miss than Brexit or Trump, they just happened to get the winner right.

That is wrong. Most early May polls predicted that Macron would earn slightly above 60 per cent of the vote. So yes, most polls underestimated Macron's lead but only by 3 to 5 per cent. https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_d ... se_de_2017

[yovargas]

Even if that's true, it is interesting that the pollsters underestimated the "populist" movement each time.

[Túrin Turambar]

538 has an article on this exact topic - they share Dave_LF's assessment that the gap between the actual result and the final aggregated polls was about ten points:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ma ... e-way-off/

Even if that's true, it is interesting that the pollsters underestimated the "populist" movement each time.

In this case, they actually overestimated it, as has been common for right-wing populist parties in Europe (the 538 article gives some other examples). It's interesting, therefore, that they underestimated the support for both Brexit and Trump.

[yovargas]

Ah, my mistake, I misunderstood.

[Dave_LF]

538 has an article on this exact topic - they share Dave_LF's assessment that the gap between the actual result and the final aggregated polls was about ten points

It's more that I share their opinion, if we're going to be honest :

The average poll conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign gave Macron a far smaller lead (22 percentage points) than he ended up winning by (32 points), for a 10-point miss.
...
The previous largest error, 8.4 percentage points, occurred in 2002, when just a single public poll was conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign. This year, 18 surveys were conducted during the same period. Not one of them had Macron winning by as large a margin as he won by.

They go on to point out that if you only consider polls from May, the miss becomes a slightly better 8.1 points.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

They both under and over estimated the populist movement in Europe.

Although LePen did not win, it did come down to two candidates who were both outside the mainstream political flow in France. There is a pretty strong anti-establishment trend going on around the western world right now, at the same time that the leadership of the western world seems to be failing at the job. They over-estimated in that LePen did not win, the under-estimated in that an outsider did win and LePen made it into the top two.

Personally, although I do not care for her at all, I was hoping to see LePen win for the entertainment value.

[Túrin Turambar]

When the result was announced, I speculated how Macron would govern as an independent with a legislature dominated by the mainstream parties. But in a development that is, I think, more surprising than Macron's original victory, his party and its allies have won a sizeable absolute majority in the Assembly.

REM and allies: 350
Republicans and allies (parliamentary right): 137
Socialists and allies (parliamentary left): 44
National Front (Le Pen): 8
Unsubmissive France (Mélenchon): 17
Others: 21

Given that Macron's Party didn't exist two years ago and France has had a relatively-stable two-party system since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in the 1960s (interrupted by the National Front) it seems hard to me to overstate just how massive this is. It'd be like the leader of a third party which hasn't even been founded yet winning the 2020 U.S. Presidential election along with over 300 seats in the House of Representatives.

It's also interesting that, in spite of the narrative of voters going for more and more extreme options, the French electorate has moved decisively to the centre. The National Front and Unsubmissive France, for the hopes of their leaders, fared fairly poorly.