Opinion polls once again underestimated the level of former President, now President-elect Donald Trump for the third straight presidential election, predicting a race predicted to be neck-and-neck with Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris when, in the end, Trump nearly swept the battleground states.
Trump’s victory involved surging support in numerous regions and demographics, but analysts state pollsters failed to predict races accurately in states where the results significantly differed from the 2020 election, which Trump lost to current President Joe Biden.
“They did fine in battlegrounds, but … they failed to provide the essential information that Trump was surging across the board,” said a professor of political science at Georgetown University, Michael Bailey.
According to The New York Times, over 90% of counties in the U.S. voted in higher numbers for Donald Trump than in 2020.
Largely, the polls predicted thin margins in races in seven battleground states that determine close elections. By Wednesday, Trump was projected to win five states by 1 to 3 percentage points.
According to those projections, former President Trump was well on his way to sweeping all seven states.
“Trump may have been mildly underestimated, but I think the polls ended up doing pretty well, collectively — this was not a huge miss,” said a political analyst at the University of Virginia Kyle Kondik. “The polls suggested Trump had a decent chance to win, and he won.”
The pollsters’ performance was under scrutiny this year after two substantial misses in succession: They failed to anticipate Trump’s victory in 2016 and overestimated Biden’s margin of victory in 2020.
Pollster — “Trump was underestimated by two points this time around”
“Trump was underestimated by about two points this time around” in critical states, said head of U.S. polling at AtlasIntel, Pedro Azevedo.
The latest polling average from RealClearPolitics put Trump ahead by 0.4 percentage points in Pennsylvania. By Wednesday, he was ahead by two points.
In North Carolina, polls predicted a 1.2-point margin by Trump, and he won by three points over VP Harris.
In Wisconsin, Harris was given a 0.4-point lead; however, the projected results showed that Donald Trump led by 0.9 points.
The main issue has remained the same since Trump arrived on the political stage about a decade ago: Firms have failed to accurately measure the impact of some of Trump’s electorate who don’t participate in opinion polls.
In the most recent presidential poll by The New York Times/ Siena College, “white Democrats were 16 percent likelier to respond than white Republicans,” said polling guru and data analyst Nate Cohn two days before the election.
That disparity continued to grow over the 2024 campaign, he added.
Although pollsters like The New York Times/Siena attempted to compensate for these flaws with statistical adjustments, this was clearly not enough.
“It is apparent that polls significantly underestimated Trump’s growth among Hispanic voters,” Azevedo said and pointed to Trump’s larger-than-expected victories in Florida and Nevada. “This is also the case among white voters,” he added.
Azevedo expected VP Harris to “improve her margins” in this demographic, but Trump outperformed polling and increased his numbers in rural areas.
Iowa is a key example of this, with a pool three days before Election Day giving VP Harris a three-point victory in the solid GOP state. In the end, said Azevedo, Trump won it handily by 13 points.
J. Ann Selzer, the author of the inaccurate Iowa poll, said voters who decided late might have made the difference.
“The late deciders could have opted for Trump in the final days of the campaign after interviewing was complete,” said Selzer to the Des Moines Register. “The people who had already voted but opted not to tell our interviewers for whom they voted could have given Trump an edge.”
