American political polling organisations, still smarting from how badly off their predictions were for who would win the November 8, 2016 presidential elections, can take some consolation from the latest polls showing they might not have been as inaccurate as they thought.

Gallup, one of the oldest polling organisations in the United States, now says that Mrs Hillary Clinton’s margin over Mr Donald Trump in the national popular vote will be close to two percentage points, making the 3.3 point Clinton margin in the pre-election national poll average “remarkably accurate”.

Mr Trump, the Republican nominee, eked out an unlikely victory and shocked the world by taking the Electoral College votes, against predictions by most polling organisations, including the most credible of them that showed a narrow win for Mrs Clinton up to the day before the election.

The Trump win shook the polling world and raised questions about whether electors should continue to place faith in public opinion surveys. Jamaica had its own version of this in February this year when the Don Anderson polls showed the People’s National Party with a four percentage point lead going into the general election.

Of course, the Jamaica Labour Party won, albeit by a one-seat margin. But the results did severe damage to the reputation of the Anderson polls for their historic accuracy, especially coming after an earlier failure in St Lucia.

Political polling has become a staple of modern elections in the free world and more investment is being pumped into collection and interpretation of data. The big US television networks forked out a tidy sum to keep viewers riveted on the poll results.

The unusual success of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog in The New York Times in the 2012 cycle caused a swell in the ranks of pollsters who emerged in the 2016 campaign.

But this year was bad for polling, starting with the shock vote by the British to leave the European Union, with polls showing the majority would elect to stay in, after a brisk campaign now known as Brexit. Mr Trump, in his campaign, predicted that he would pull off an American version of Brexit…and did.

Gallup, however, says American pollsters were not so wrong after all, arguing that this was a complex election since Mrs Clinton won the popular vote and Mr Trump won the Electoral College.

The organisation’s editor-in-chief, Dr Frank Newport, is quoted as saying: “As of this writing, Clinton is ahead of Trump by 1.5 percentage points (48.1 per cent to 46.6 per cent), representing the fact that she has received over two million more votes than Trump. The margin could grow to two points.

Gallup reasoned that the average “gap” estimate on the national popular vote, as calculated by RealClear Politics prior to the election, was 3.3 points, which meant that the national popular vote estimate would end up being significantly closer to the actual result than was the case in 2012, and well within the margin of error.

“To come within less than two percentage points on the gap is a remarkable polling achievement and should be applauded,” it suggested.

Much of this, of course, is academic, because in the US system, the Electoral College determines the winner, an arrangement said to give smaller states a bigger stake in the elections for president.