Pollsters were blindsided by breadth of Trump win
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. WASHINGTON : Pollsters as a group had prepared Americans for a very close presidential race, and that is the way it turned out in several battleground states. But the polling performance was a big miss in another way: The pervasiveness of Donald Trump’s popularity wasn’t fully telegraphed to the public.
Trump appears to have won Wisconsin over Kamala Harris by a single percentage point, compared with a final FiveThirtyEight.com average of a 1-point Harris edge. Trump won Georgia by 2 points, compared with a final average finding of a 0.8-point Trump lead. He won North Carolina by 3 points, compared with his 1-point edge in the final polling average.
That is within the ballpark of what polls can offer. Yet many surveys didn’t signal that Trump would end up making such broad gains compared with 2020, including his improved margins among both college-educated and working-class voters, in exurbs as well as rural communities. Trump as of Wednesday afternoon was leading in the national popular vote by about 3.5 points.
But with a projected eight million votes still uncounted in California alone, it couldn’t yet be determined how different the final margin will be from the 1.2-point Harris lead in FiveThirtyEight.com’s final average, or the 0.9-point lead she held in the Cook Political Report average. “Pollsters—given the crudeness of the data available to them—they weren’t horrible this time," said Josh Clinton, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, who led a polling trade association’s postmortem in 2020. That look back found that pre-election polls were the most inaccurate in 40 years.
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