I think the polling industry is going to have to come up with some way of measuring enthusiasm about a candidate . That ' s exactly what the widely panned LA Times poll attempted to do . Of course , everyone trashed it at the time , but it was the only poll to accurately predict Trump ' victoryThe poll design allowed respondents to assign themselves a probability , from zero to 100 , of their voting for either candidate . This approach , rather than simply asking for a concrete voting preference , may have allowed the poll to be more precise in detecting shifts in sentiment . The USC poll ' s results also were weighted based on how people said they voted in 2012 an approach that experts criticized on the basis that many people misstate or misremember how they voted in the past . 1111 h o w t h e u s c d o r n s i f e l a t i mespollsawtrumpswincoming