The 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was very confusing as the polls represented to the public did not match the result. Polls should provide Americans with an equal opportunity to express their opinions in a way that the electoral process cannot. However, after this election, many people felt like they had lost their voice. Almost all political polls had Clinton as the winner, but that obviously wasn't the case when Trump was elected president of the United States. Many wonder how pollsters could have been so wrong, but there is no definitive answer, just a few theories. People can greatly influence polls because “they can change their minds, they can decide not to share their opinions, or they can outright lie (Chalabi, 2016).” The most discussed theory as to why surveys were wrong is non-response bias which occurs when an individual is unable or unwilling to respond to the survey. According to www.pewreseach.org, “some groups – including less educated voters who represented a key demographic for Trump on Election Day – are consistently difficult for pollsters to reach (Mercer, Deane, McGreeney, 2016).” Say no to plagiarism. . Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay People with lower levels of education and lower incomes are less likely to respond to any political poll because they may choose not to if they are not educated in politics or if they do not have a telephone at which they can be reached. If there had been a greater number of uneducated or less fortunate people planning to vote for Trump than Clinton, this would have caused the polls to be more favorable to Clinton. This is a very substantial sampling error that potentially affected the outcome of the polls during the 2016 election. The second theory as to why the polls were wrong is the “shy Trumper hypothesis.” This idea states that many people were shy about saying they would vote for Trump since, at the time of the election, it was socially undesirable to vote for him. Most people had a desire to please (a sampling error) pollsters so that they may have told them they were going to vote for Clinton when in fact they intended to vote for Trump. During this election, these people were known as “the silent majority” where many people remained silent about their intentions to vote for Trump to please the rest of society. This hypothesis is closely tied to the 1982 election in which “Democrat Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to Republican George Deukmejian despite being ahead in the polls, presumably because voters were reluctant to tell interviewers that they would not vote for a black candidate (Mercer, Deane, McGeeney, 2016).” This theory of timid Trump supporters could definitely be a reason why polls say that “Trump has a 15% chance of winning, about the same chance of rolling a total of sixes if you have two dice (Chalabi, 2016) ” and underestimating Trump's level of support. The final theory is “probable voter bias” or social desirability bias, which describes how Americans say they were going to vote but actually had no intention of doing so. Some people may have planned to vote when they took the survey, but later changed their minds. This change.