Pollsters have once again underestimated support for President-elect Donald Trump.
A race that was thought to be dead even for months was called within hours of polls closing Tuesday night, as Trump is expected to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in both the Electoral College and the national popular vote.
The final RealClearPolitics polling average had Harris with a minuscule 0.1-point advantage, while another polling aggregator, FiveThirtyEight, had her up by 1.2 points nationally going into the election.
Many votes have yet to be counted, but Trump currently holds a 3.5-point lead nationally. He’s outperformed the polls in states across the battleground map and even made inroads in blue strongholds, such as New Jersey, that were unthinkable for a Republican before today.
Pollsters have consistently undercounted Trump’s support throughout his three presidential campaigns, raising questions about the methodology of polls or Republicans’ reluctance to be candid about their views.
In 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was considered the heavy favorite to win on election night before she lost by narrow margins in three blue-wall states. Even when Trump was defeated four years later, President Joe Biden underperformed his 7.5-point lead nationally, winding up with a 4.5-point win in the popular vote.
While ballots are still being counted on the West Coast, many Midwestern and East Coast states are nearly finished tabulating votes and show a clear shift toward Trump that defies the polls.
Perhaps most notably, the vaunted Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll that showed Harris up by 3 points in the campaign’s final days wound up being off by 16 points, as Trump carried the state 56% to 43%.
In some states, the polling averages were closer, even if the direction was wrong. The RealClearPolitics average for Michigan stood at Harris plus-0.5 and Wisconsin at Harris plus-0.4. With 98% of the vote counted, Trump is winning Michigan by 1.6 points and Wisconsin by 0.9 points. A CNN poll conducted in late October showed Harris winning Wisconsin by 6 points.
Then, there were the surveys that accurately forecasted the race. The polling average for Georgia was almost perfect, with a predicted Trump advantage of 2.2 points yielding a 2.3-point win. However, even in the Peach State, some individual polls were off, such as a New York Times survey that had Harris winning Georgia by 1 point.
RealClearPolitics predicted Trump would finish with 287 Electoral College votes, but he is now expected to take in 312.
Trump finished much stronger in 2024 than he did in 2020, even in places he lost. He improved on his margin in New York by 13 points, in New Jersey by 12 points, and in Maryland by 11 points.
How have deep blue states moved in this election from 2020 to 2024:
New York: D+23 -> D+12
New Jersey: D+16 -> D+4
Massachussetts: D+33 -> D+26
Rhode Island: D+23 -> D+13
Connecticut: D+20 -> D+8
Vermont: D+36 -> D+32
Maryland: D+33 -> D+22
Delaware: D+19 -> D+14— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) November 6, 2024
Some surveys predicted Trump would lose New York by as many as 19 points and New Jersey by as many as 20.
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J. Ann Selzer, who led the Iowa poll showing Harris ahead in the deep-red state, said she will be reviewing the data and trying to get closer to matching the result in the future.
“The poll findings we produced for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom did not match what the Iowa electorate ultimately decided in the voting booth today,” she said in a prepared statement. “I’ll be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that happened. And, I welcome what that process might teach me.”