US election results: how did opinion polls still underestimate Trump voters? | US Election News 2024

On the eve of Tuesday's US presidential elections, opinion polls predicted a neck-and-neck race between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Yet Trump ultimately won a comfortable victory, defying most polls. He has already won five of the seven swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin and appears poised to win the other two, Arizona and Nevada. Most of these victories are greater than the polls predicted.

And, while most pollsters had predicted a narrowing of the gap between Harris and Trump in the popular vote, almost all had Harris in the lead. Ultimately, Trump is on track to not only win the popular vote, but by a margin of nearly 5 million votes. It's a victory no Republican can boast of since George HW Bush in 1988.

In total, Trump has already won 295 Electoral College votes, comfortably more than the 270 needed to win, while Harris has won 226. If he wins Arizona and Nevada as expected, Trump will end up with 312 votes in the electoral college.

So how did the opinion polls get this bad?

What do polls predict about swing states?

Most national polls, weeks after voting began, predicted that the two candidates would be deadlocked, believing the race was too close to call.

Days before the election, some pollsters, such as polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, then changed their position slightly and predicted that Harris was more likely to win, albeit by a small margin of less than 2 percent.

In the seven battleground states, Harris is projected to win a majority, based on an average of polls from aggregator FiveThirtyEight, in the traditionally Democratic or Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump led polls in North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, while there was almost nothing separating the two candidates in Nevada, polls showed.

On election night, Trump won the three states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He is expected to win Arizona by a wide margin. And he's ahead in Nevada by three percentage points, well beyond what polls predicted.

What about the other states Trump won?

In Iowa, the Midwest state that has long been solidly Republican, Selzer and Co, a trusted polling firm owned by analyst J Ann Selzer, surprisingly predicted that Harris would win by three percentage points over Trump in the last days of the campaign.

To be sure, it was an outlier poll: An Emerson College poll, released at almost the same time, showed Trump winning the state by nine percentage points.

But Selzer is widely respected in the polling industry and has repeatedly called Iowa correctly in presidential and Senate elections over the decades.

She cited widespread anger among white women over the rollback of hard-won abortion rights by Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices in 2022, and said previously undecided female voters were late for Harris, giving him the advantage.

Trump, on his social media channel, Truth Social, condemned Selzer's poll, calling her the enemy and saying the poll was grossly flawed.

Ultimately, Trump won the state by 13 percentage points more than even many Republican-funded polls predicted.

When polls are this wrong, it exacerbates a key challenge in this race: the perceived lack of legitimacy of polls, Tina Fordham of risk consulting firm Fordham Global Foresight told Al Jazeera.

What about the states Trump lost?

Pollsters were wrong even in several states that Harris won, underestimating Trump's support and thus predicting a much larger margin of victory for the vice president in solidly blue states than was expected. passed during the election:

New York: The polling average as of early November 5 gave Harris a 16 percentage point victory. She won by 11 points. New Jersey: Harris, according to FiveThirtyEight, was expected to win by 17 percentage points. She beat Trump but only by 5 points. New Hampshire: Polls suggest Harris would win by 5 percentage points. She barely beat Trump by two percentage points. Did the pollsters warn of possible errors?

Yes, pollsters always point out that their surveys operate with margins of error in their calculations of around 4 percent in many cases. That means their predictions could be off by 4 percent in either direction: if Harris leads Trump 48 to 44 percent, for example, they could actually end up tied, or Harris could possibly end up with a victory of 8 percent.

Nate Silver, who founded the pollster FiveThirtyEight and now hosts the Silver Bulletin newsletter, wrote in the New York Times before the vote that his instincts were with Trump. Silver had earlier predicted a deadlock, but it's possible, he noted, that polls are underestimating the number of Trump supporters because they haven't been able to reach them for surveys.

But in the final days leading up to Nov. 5, Silver was one of several pollsters who said their models had tilted slightly more toward Harris, giving her a 48 percent chance of victory to Trump's 47 percent.

(Al Jazeera) Have the polls ever been wrong?

Yes. In the United States, polling began in the 1880s using newspapers collecting local opinions. Historically, predictions have often proven correct.

But lately they have often been wrong too.

In 2016, opinion polls correctly predicted the popular vote for Hillary Clinton, but also had her winning comfortably in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which Trump ultimately won. Their predictions that Clinton would win the Electoral College turned out to be wrong.

Polls were wrong again in 2020, when COVID-19 restrictions severely limited surveys. Most polls correctly predicted that Joe Biden would win the electoral college and the national vote. But they significantly overestimated support for Democrats to an unusual extent, according to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), while underestimating voters supporting Trump. Researchers called the survey the least accurate in 40 years.

Then, in 2022, the polls went the other way for the midterm elections.

Some polls predicted that Republicans would win majorities in the House and Senate that year. Ultimately, the race was much closer, at least in the Senate, where neither party achieved a majority, but Democrats ended up taking control by a vote of 51 to 49, with support from independents who formed a caucus with them. The Republicans, as expected, won the House. 222 213.

Why are the polls wrong?

According to the researchers, it all depends on who participates in their surveys, how representative they are of the electorate and the sincerity of their responses. Without accurate data, polls mean nothing.

As Silver acknowledged in his New York Times column, one of the main challenges pollsters face is getting enough potential voters to respond to their surveys. Usually, opinions are collected through phone calls, but this has become more difficult due to caller ID apps that help people filter out calls considered spam.

Republicans, in particular, may be less likely than Democrats to speak to the media or respond to polls, and have been underrepresented in previous polls, according to AAPOR's findings. It doesn't help that Trump has also publicly criticized opinion polls as false, likely further incentivizing his supporters to stop participating in them. Trump has often attacked mainstream media, calling the press the enemy of the state in 2019.

In contrast, Democrats, particularly college-educated people, are more likely to engage and are also likely to be overrepresented, analysts say.

Although pollsters attempt to close the participation gap using emails and online surveys, some online polls tend to attract only certain types of participants because they offer compensation, writes academic Jérôme Viala-Guadefroy in research publication The Conversation.

(This compensation) leads to issues of accuracy and representation, he wrote.

In 2020, restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to make investigations more difficult. AAPOR found that states with the highest polling errors corresponded to states with higher virus cases.

Did online betting sites do better than pollsters?

American University professor and polling expert Allan Lichtman, who correctly predicted the 2016 election in Trump's favor, admitted that his prediction this time around, that he predicted a Harris victory, was wrong. false. In an article on X on Thursday, Lichtman said he wanted to evaluate why the keys were wrong and what we can learn from the error.

Meanwhile, online, a new breed of prediction betting companies, where people can bet money on topics like crypto or election candidates, are gloating and praising themselves for predicting correctly a more likely victory for Trump. The thousands of people who bet on Trump are looking at potential winnings of about $450 million collectively.

In the days leading up to the Nov. 5 vote, Trump's odds of victory rose on at least five online betting sites, providing, some say, a much more realistic picture than the polls did.

Last night, Polymarket proved the wisdom of the markets in the face of polls, the media and experts.

Polymarket predicted results consistently and accurately well ahead of all three, demonstrating the power of high-volume, highly liquid prediction markets like those pioneered by

Polymarché (@Polymarket) November 6, 2024

Polymarket, which also counts Nate Silver as one of its advisers, was one of many to put Trump on better footing. In an article published Wednesday on X, Polymarket said this proved the wisdom of markets in the face of polls, media and experts.

Polymarket predicted results consistently and accurately well in advance of all three, demonstrating the power of high-volume, highly liquid prediction markets like those pioneered by Polymarket, the release said.

Kalshi, another popular betting site, revealed to US publication Fast Company that 28,000 people were betting on Harris on its platform, while 40,000 were betting on Trump. They understood well.

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