Once again, polls missed a decisive share of Trump voters in 2024

As U.S. pollsters and poll aggregators conduct their post-mortem of the 2024 presidential election, some are already saying their pre-election surveys were right, noting the close results in each of the seven presidential battlegrounds.

But there is one key point not to be missed: Polls have once again underestimated the extent of support for President-elect Donald Trump, despite the many changes pollsters made after their failures in 2020 and 2016.

To be sure, this year's polls appear to have missed the mark by fewer than four years ago, and the results in swingstates were close enough to be within the margin of error for a considerable number of polls, according to an NBC News. Decision analysis.

But the absence of Trump supporters in public polls meant that pre-election polling averages did not show Trump winning in key states, which is why the result seemed so surprising to some, even though we did not. probably shouldn't have been.

NBC News compared Trump's support in polls of likely voters conducted in October and November to the percentage of votes he received in national and state elections. The trend is similar to what we saw in pre-election polls from the previous two presidential elections: the average poll underestimated support for Trump almost everywhere, and in the seven swing states the failure was consistently between 2 and 3 percentage points.

Pollsters can take some comfort from the fact that polling averages in state-level presidential elections were slightly better than in 2020, perhaps suggesting that polling adjustments helped limit the overall error of polls. polls. In an analysis of all public polling reported in the last two weeks of the 2020 election, pre-election polls conducted in the last two weeks underestimated support for Trump by 3.3 percentage points in average compared to the final results. In 2024, polls over the past two weeks have underestimated his support by an average of 2.4 points.

The chart below shows the gap between polls and results at the national level, as well as the number of polls taken in October and November.

This underestimation of Trump's support has spread in polls across the political spectrum, from solid Democratic states (New York, 4.6 points too low), to states thought to trend purple in dreams from Democrats (Texas, 4.4 points too low), to solid Republican states (Wyoming, 5.8 points too low), to swing states (Nevada, 2.9 percent too low). This is despite pollsters' attempts to explain the difficulty of getting Trump. supporters to respond to their surveys.

Whether the polls suggest the right mood about the race depends on where you look. Numerous polls in the critical states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin suggest either a tie race or one with a margin of one point. Given the margins of sampling error and other sources of error in polling, these results left plenty of room for the final results to swing one way or the other. But the closely divided polls surprised some when Trump ended up sweeping all seven states.

Most polls correctly showed Trump winning Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, but did not show him leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. And even when polls in swing states correctly identified Trump as leading, a significant number of surveys underestimated his support. more than the margin of error.

For example, Trump led in 85% of polls in the state of Arizona, but 36% of polls in Arizona underestimated his lead beyond the margin of error.

Reasons for discrepancy

So what happened? Two culprits seem likely.

First, it is possible that the polls once again failed to attract enough new voters or voters who changed their vote from supporting Biden in 2020 to supporting Trump in 2024. Trump may have once again mobilized voters ready to vote, but they are unlikely to have turned to pollsters, just as we saw in 2020.

If people who respond to polls differ in their opinions from those who do not, especially in a way or to an extent that pollsters do not predict, then it is difficult, if not impossible, to measure public opinion . Voters who feel disrespected or misunderstood when sharing their opinions with journalists or pollsters may simply choose to avoid them altogether.

Second, pollsters trying to estimate what the 2024 electorate would look like may have simply made false assumptions, which could easily have caused a polling error like the one we just saw. This illustrates a difficulty unique to pre-election polling: the need for pollsters to adjust their data to match what they think the electorate will be, without knowing whether these adjustments are correct.

But if the 2024 electorate had changed in ways that were not accounted for by the pollsters' assumptions, the adjustments would have been inadequate.

In 2024, for example, many pollsters began weighting so that respondents' self-reported past voting (that is, whether people reported voting for Trump or Biden in the last election) matches the result of 2020. This is a statistical correction that pollsters used this cycle to address the previous undercount of Trump voters. By weighing the polls to match the popular vote four years ago, pollsters assumed that Biden voters in 2020 and Trump voters would vote at the same rate in 2024, but if Trump voters were slightly more likely to vote and Biden voters were slightly less likely to vote, which could easily produce a 2-point underestimate of support for Trump.

Where do we go from here?

Nate Silver recently said the polls aren't the problem. We agree. The problem is not the poll, but the way polls are presented and interpreted. In fact, it's remarkable that a pollster can talk to all 800 people who agree to participate in a poll and come up with a result within a few points of the result of an election in which nearly 150 million votes were cast.

The problems arise because people want polls to do more than they actually can, such as deciphering who is leading in a close race or identifying small shifts in a candidate's support. The reason people think polls can do this is because poll results are often presented and discussed in a way that suggests they are more accurate than is actually possible, often in graphs showing the candidates separated by simple decimal points. These averages and tenth-of-a-point graphs give a false picture of precision.

Even though polling journalism was better in 2024 than in the past, with more media coverage mentioning the margin of error alongside polling results, much of the media discourse still made polls seem like an instrument surgically precise to dissect political events and campaigns. You can get closer to it than a butter knife than a scalpel, but even with skill, it takes a bit of luck to get it right.

Another problem that makes interpreting pre-election polls difficult is that most pollsters avoid disclosing how they collect and adjust the data. Without knowing where the data comes from and especially how pollsters have adjusted and weighted their data in hopes of trying to predict what the electorate will look like, it becomes very difficult to evaluate or compare results. When reasonable decisions about weighting can vary a poll's margin by as much as 8 points, it is impossible to know to what extent the results reflect the decisions of voters, pollsters, or both.

Given these concerns and the polling errors we saw again in 2024, should we abandon pre-election polling (as Gallup and the Pew Research Center have done)? Although tempting, this solution is not the right one. Properly understood, pre-election polls can play an important role in democracy by providing insight into what outcomes seem possible. The fact that most polls showed a close race in 2024 highlighted the possibility that either candidate could win and may have helped increase public acceptance of the results.

But things must change. In addition to pushing for more transparency, industry organizations such as the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers have emphasized the importance of taking a more humble perspective on what we can learn from a poll. Polls can help identify issues that are more or less important to voters, but they will still have difficulty identifying winners in 1- or 2-point races. And in a very polarized nation, that's often the kind of race we have.

It is also important for pollsters to be more transparent about their choices affecting reported results. Even if pollsters want to focus their attention on what they believe to be the best estimate, based on their knowledge and skill, it seems prudent to show the importance of reasonable alternatives. Given the impossibility of knowing which decisions are best in advance, it is important to know whether different, reasonable decisions produce radically different estimates. Observe how the results change under various plausible possibilities, such as high Republican turnout and low Democratic turnout, or vice versa. could help better convey a range of outcomes that could occur.

Pre-election polls are difficult. This is not an excuse, it is a reality. Treating pre-election polls as revealing deep, knowable truths without recognizing the uncertainty inherent in these polls risks misinterpretations, media cycles fueled by misleading numbers, and loss of public confidence in judgment and expertise of the people involved in the surveys and analyses.

Even if the 2024 polls performed better than in 2020, and pollsters can credibly say their surveys were in the same range as the results, we are still asking too much of an overly blunt tool. Instead, we should think about how we can use pre-election polls in ways that capture the electoral possibilities at stake and better describe the uncertainties involved.

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