Source: Polling averages from the Silver Bulletin.
The national vote margin is based on the author’s projection of the final vote total, as votes are still being counted in some states.
Graphic by Quoctrung Bui
Mr. Trump beat his polling numbers by about 2.5 points nationally (based on my projection of the popular vote once all votes are counted — what’s left is mostly from blue states) and 2.1 points in the average swing state. Our final forecast had it so close to 50-50 that the outcome was literally more random than a coin flip. (Empirically, heads
win 50.5 percent of the time.) But a Trump sweep of the swing states was our
single most likely outcome, because polling errors tend to be correlated.
It’s not great that the polls missed low on Mr. Trump for the third and final time, even in a year when survey companies adopted all sorts of novel strategies to avoid this exact outcome.
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The core problem is easy to describe but hard to fix. Namely, polls routinely get
higher response rates from Democrats than from Republicans. Democrats have higher civic engagement, trust the media more and are more comfortable revealing their political preferences. (They can also be
more enthusiastic.)
But Republicans have become much less trusting of institutions, and that likely includes polling. And the current G.O.P. coalition led by Mr. Trump includes more so-called marginal voters, those who may not regularly follow the news but who still show up at the ballot box for him.
In 2024 a number of surveys used something called weighting by recalled vote — which means weighting data based on whom voters say they chose in the previous election. That can be a problem because voters don’t always remember their earlier votes.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIt can also cause polls to miss shifts in the electorate. Some of the states with the biggest polling misses — like Arizona and, although it isn’t a swing state any longer, Florida — were substantially
affected by Covid-era migration patterns. In those states, conservative refugees moved from blue states for a lower cost of living and schools that were quicker to reopen.
Until this year, I would have said that the cure of weighting by recalled vote was worse than the disease. Now I’m not so sure. The Selzer poll, for example, would have had Mr. Trump up by six points if it had
applied this technique — not perfect, but much better.
Other practices are less defensible. One of these is herding, or massaging your numbers so that they don’t produce an outlier result. There are
unmistakable signs of this, with many polls bunched within two percentage points. By my calculations, there was only a one in 10 trillion probability of this happening by chance alone.
There’s also a universe of Republican-leaning polling shops, which have been the subject of intense criticism from Democrats. In 2022 these companies had a bad year, contributing to a misleading narrative about a red wave. This year they were mostly accurate. However, one prominent outfit, Rasmussen Reports, was discovered to be
coordinating with the Trump campaign and giving them early previews of their results.
We need fewer of these companies and more like AtlasIntel, a Brazilian company that showed results that often differed from the consensus but at least provided an independent opinion. In its final round of polling, AtlasIntel accurately had Mr. Trump
ahead in all the swing states.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSo the problems with polls match those in the rest of the media. A lack of trusted sources means there’s a vacuum to fill, and sometimes it’s filled with low-quality data or even outright misinformation.
Should we trust polls less? I’ll offer a brave and qualified no, but only because the shift in public sentiment about polls — from viewing them as oracular to seeing them as fake news — has probably overcorrected relative to reality.
Ms. Selzer
announced her retirement from polling over the weekend to pursue “other ventures and opportunities.” Although her career change had been planned in advance, it still marks the end of an era. We should have learned by now that more data does not necessarily mean more certainty. We’re no longer in a time when we can count on polls to reflect the indisputable ground truth.
But the thing is, we never really were.
I’ve been working for years to get people to understand the uncertainties inherent in polling in the form of probabilistic forecasts. The misses in 2016, 2020 and 2024 were within the normal range of error in the long and checkered history of polling — like the Gallup poll that had Thomas Dewey
defeating Harry Truman in
1948 or the ones in 1980 that
missed Ronald Reagan’s landslide.
It’s telling that 2020 was, by far, the worst of the three recent elections in terms of how much polls differed from the final margins but the one for which pollsters got the least grief, because Mr. Biden won. That’s only because he had such a large lead. In most elections now, their practical margins of error are going to be larger than the actual margins separating the candidates in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThere are no great alternatives. Prediction markets had a strong year. (I’m a part-time adviser to one of them, Polymarket.) But they’ve also had their
misses, like insisting that Mr. Trump still had a chance in 2020 even after the election had already been called for Mr. Biden. And although
my gut instinct that Mr. Trump would win this year turned out to be right, that was basically just a wild guess that people shouldn’t have taken too seriously.
There’s another side of the coin. Rank-and-file Democratic voters trust the polls more than Republicans, but that does not seem to be true among the Democratic elites who dictate campaign strategy. In fact, it sure seems to me that Democrats made the mistake of routinely dismissing public opinion. Before Mr. Biden exited the race, the White House publicly insisted that the polls
were skewed, even as its internal polling reportedly showed him in even
worse shape than the public polls. And on an array of issues, Democrats downplayed inconvenient polling truths — about the public’s dislike for inflation and lax immigration policies, about Mr. Biden’s
age, about Ms. Harris’s middling popularity and, yes, about the cultural phenomenon that we call wokeness.
The polls have become part of a broader phenomenon in which parties, voters and the media create their own political realities. We trust them when they present a case we agree with, but we ignore, unskew or deride them as biased when they don’t. It is left for elections to provide a reality check.
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Nov. 18, 2024Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and the author of “
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter
Silver Bulletin. He is a part-time adviser for Polymarket, a political prediction market.
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