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How Did Pollsters Not See President-Elect Trump Coming?

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Despite all of the analysis and polls indicating otherwise, Donald Trump is our president-elect.

"It is time for us to come together as one united people," Trump said as he accepted the victory in the early morning hours on Wednesday.

So, what went wrong with polling leading up to the election? We asked Drexel politics professor Bill Rosenberg. "I think it was a surprise to many he ended up winning. Virtually every major polling organization and modeler was predicting Hillary Clinton was going to win."

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He says the polls were close, within the margin of error, but they didn't factor in low response rates, which is the percent of people who even agree to answer pollster questions. "If you have very few people who agree to do the surveys, it's because they don't want to talk to you and maybe they're going to have some hidden belief they're going to act on," Rosenberg explained.

"My theory is that there were a lot of undercover Trump supporters," Kumba Molino said. "Maybe the people who supported Trump were a little more quiet about it than the people that opposed him," added Valerie Niemann.

So, should we trust polling?

"I think you should trust polling," Rosenberg said. "But, I think the polling locations should have to do something about their reporting."

Rosenberg said that means more clearly indicating the percent of people willing to respond' a change too late for many who say they've given up faith in following polls.

"Numbers don't lie, but people who select samples can be biased," said Joe Mullin.

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"This kind of shows it's not accurate. It's not true," Molino said of polls.

"I don't know if you should not trust polls, but I think we definitely need to start paying more attention to and start questioning the things that we read and not just accept the polls as they are," James Kuchta said.

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