Republicans have often claimed that the polls lean left. To their point, every GOP presidential candidate since 2004, minus Mitt Romney, has outperformed national polling come Election Day.
With the 2024 elections just four days away, former President Donald Trump is leading in the national polls for the first time in his three bids for the White House. While Trump lost the popular vote twice, he outperformed the polls in 2016 by 1.1 points and 2.7 points in 2020.
RealClearPolitics’s polling archive goes back as far as 2004, when former President George W. Bush won reelection against John Kerry. The national polling average had Bush leading by 1.5 points, but he outperformed by 0.9 points to win the popular vote by 2.4 points.
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Former President Barack Obama was predicted in the national polls to crush John McCain by 7.6 points in 2008, and while the popular vote wasn’t particularly close, McCain did outperform the polls by 0.3 points. In 2012, however, the polls predicted Obama would beat Romney by just 0.7 points — he won by 3.9 points.
Democrat-aligned Blue Rose Research pollster David Shor suggested that the polls tend to favor Democrats due to a “partisan nonresponse” phenomenon where certain groups of Republicans are less likely to respond to surveys compared to their left-leaning counterparts.
Shor pointed to 2020 early voting figures, which showed that “early voters were considerably less Democratic than people thought.” As 2024 early voting data are coming out ahead of the elections, Democrats are once again turning out at a lower rate than expected.
Trump has speculated that nefarious motives are at play. He claimed on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that pollsters might be fudging the numbers in some states to make them look less competitive so Republicans stay home on Election Day, believing resistance is futile.
The election betting markets, which have historically been extremely effective predictors of elections, give Trump a 60.6% chance to beat Vice President Kamala Harris on average. The most popular election betting platform, Polymarket, gives Harris a 62% chance to win the popular vote, while Trump’s national polling lead stands at 0.3 points.
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According to ElectionBettingOdds.com founder Maxim Lott’s research, election betting odds also have a slight lean toward Democratic candidates, but less so than election models like FiveThirtyEight do. Both tend to be more “surprised” when a Republican wins.
The former president is currently favored to win five out of the seven 2024 battleground states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona. Harris is favored to win Michigan and Wisconsin. The swing state polling averages show the same results.