Pollsters were blindsided by breadth of Trump win
Summary
The surveys missed that he would gain among so many different voter groups.
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.
“We didn’t see this coming perfectly," he said of this year’s polls, “but it’s very hard given the coarseness of the instrument we have here."
Clinton said that in the 2022 midterm elections, polls didn’t significantly understate support for either party. But they have now understated Trump’s support in three presidential elections in a row. That raises the question of whether pollsters have still failed to find a way to navigate the political weather system Trump creates, which is unique in politics. In particular, Clinton said, pollsters have had trouble reaching and including the new voters that Trump has pulled off the sidelines of the electorate and into the active voter pool.
“What other politician has people with flags and boat parades? He’s unique in mobilizing people around his vision, and that may appeal to people who don’t trust the establishment and will vote but not participate in polls," Clinton said.
The polls did give solid signals that Trump’s appeal had grown among Black, Latino and young voters, particularly among men in those groups.
The final Wall Street Journal national poll, in late October, found Trump winning 19% of Black voters; he ultimately won 15%, according to AP VoteCast. The Journal poll found Trump winning 40% among Hispanic voters, in line with his ultimate 42% support. And the dramatic swing among young men to the GOP, those under age 30, had been amply forecast.
Overall, the final Journal poll had Trump leading by 2 points among registered voters.
Write to Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com
