| But those are all examples of data collection working fine, though, and people not listening to the data because their anecdotes went the wrong way. FiveThirtyEight predicted a 28.6% chance of a Trump victory: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ This is a number far greater than zero - it is, for comparison, more likely than flipping two coins and them both coming up heads, or drawing a random card from a deck and having it be diamonds. Opinion polling of the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election showed Boris Johnson favored to win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_C... Opinion polling on Brexit showed that it clearly could have gone either way, with a narrow margin between the two options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United... I'm less familiar with Australian politics, but assuming you mean the 2013 election, opinion polls showed the Liberals were clearly in the lead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2013_A... If people look at data that says "28.6% chance of winning" and they choose to read it as "0% chance of winning," that's not a problem with the way anyone's measuring anything, that's a problem with people trying to treat data as if it's an anecdote. |