Did The 2024 Election Polls Get It Wrong Newsweek

Leo Migdal

-Dec 10, 2025, 11:22 PM

did the 2024 election polls get it wrong newsweek

In the weeks and days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, the polls broadly captured a very close race, with voters more-or-less evenly split between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, including across the... There even appeared to be momentum in Democratic nominee Harris's favor towards the very end, with some of the country's leading forecasters seeing enough in the polling data to put her as the marginally... One shocking poll in particular by Ann Selzer in Iowa—a highly-rated pollster with a strong record—showed a huge swing towards Harris in the final week of the election race, putting her three points in... In the end, Trump won all the swing states and is on course to win the popular vote—the first Republican nominee to do so in 20 years if so—and may carry a GOP-majority Senate... Some votes, including millions in California, are still being tallied. There is a sense in the post-election autopsy—fueled in part by how polls were used by forecasters—that this is another miss for the polling industry because it generally failed to capture the strength and...

Most political polls for the 2024 presidential election saw a close race in the electoral college, and a resounding popular-vote victory for Democrat Kamala Harris. Trump won the electoral college 312 to 226, and the popular vote by more than three million votes. We asked polling and survey expert Andy Crosby with the UCR School of Public Policy to tell us what the polls may have missed, or whether we — the voters — misinterpreted the polls. Crosby writes: Overall, high-quality polls were quite accurate. For example, the final national New York Times/Siena of likely voters conducted October 20-23 showed a tie (48%-48%).

As of Monday, November 11, with most votes now tallied, former President Trump holds a 50.2%-48.1% lead nationally — a result which is within that poll’s margin of error of 2.2%. Although one might initially think a final election result differing than the final polls indicates that polls were incorrect, this is why polls publish their margin of error: it tells the reader how much... This year, our final election results largely appear within that margin of error, indicating the polls were in fact quite accurate. We also know that some voters make their final voting decision on election day. As polls also predicted, race, ethnicity, and gender also played an important dynamic in the final electoral outcomes. Notably, according to current exit poll data, white respondents favored Trump (57%-41%), whereas black respondents heavily favored Harris (85%-13%).

Asian respondents also favored Harris (54% Harris, 39% Trump), as did Hispanic respondents (52% Harris, 46% Trump). Gender was also an important factor: men favored Trump (55%-42%), whereas women favored Harris (53-45%). Polls were also accurate across several swing states, including perhaps the most important battleground state, Pennsylvania. The final New York Times/Siena in Pennsylvania conducted October 29-November 2 showed the state as a tie (48%-48%) in its final poll before the election. As of Monday, November 11, Trump leads the state 50.5% to 48.5% with 99% of the vote in. That result is again well within the Times/Siena poll’s margin of error of 3.5% (state polls tend to have slightly larger margins of error in part because fewer people are sampled).

With nearly all the ballots now counted in the 2024 election, we can fully evaluate the performance of the national and battleground polls this cycle. The verdict: They weren’t perfect, but they were more right than wrong — especially given the polling industry’s challenges and recent misses. Let’s start with the presidential horse race numbers. The final national NBC News poll had Donald Trump and Kamala Harris tied at 49% each, while the national RealClearPolitics average of the two-way contest was Harris 48.7%, Trump 48.6%. And The New York Times’ average was Harris 49%, Trump 48%. The actual result in the popular vote as it currently stands, which you can expect to change slightly amid the very last counting of ballots: Trump 49.9%, Harris 48.3%.

The 2024 national polls — on average — slightly overstated support for Harris and understated it for Trump. But they did turn in one of the best performances in presidential polling over the past decade, according to historical data from the Pew Research Center. For much of the 2024 US presidential campaign, polls and pundits rated the race too close to call. Then Donald Trump delivered a commanding victory over Kamala Harris, winning at least five battleground states, and performing unexpectedly well in other places. He is now poised to become the first Republican in two decades to win the popular vote, and could enter office with a Republican-controlled House and Senate at his back. So were the polls wrong about it being a tight contest?

At the national level, they certainly appeared to underestimate Trump for the third election in a row. And how much should you read into figures ahead of the 2024 election? With the 2024 presidential election just days away, new data from pollsters about the presidential election is seemingly being released every day. In the early period of the election, these polls depicted a variety of scenarios, but are now mostly focused on the general election matchup: the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, and the Democratic... Harris gained an early momentum in the polls upon replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. However, the race remains a closely contested toss-up, with the margin of error for most polls meaning that either candidate could eke out an election victory.

The race is particularly close in key battleground states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania. As recent years have proved, polling is often, sometimes heavily, incorrect. Case in point: Polling generated by HuffPost on Election Day 2016 concluded that Hillary Clinton had a 98% chance of beating Trump. However, while the polls that year were dramatically wrong, most polling throughout the 2020 election cycle correctly predicted that Joe Biden would defeat Trump. So given that polling accuracy has been on both sides of the coin, how much trust should the public place in polls? Escape your echo chamber.

Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. An embarrassing night for forecasts raises questions about how to fix broken lines of communication From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important... At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it. Kamala Harris’s collapse Tuesday evening was shocking to many in the political press, who had expected a tight election but one that, if anything, looked to be trending in her favor heading into Election... Despite all the “dead heat” and “neck-and-neck” predictions, in the end it wasn’t that close. Donald Trump secured a clear victory in the U.S.

presidential election this month. It wasn’t a landslide, but he won comfortably with 312 electoral votes. The president-elect also won the popular vote by 3.2 million votes, the first time a Republican had done so since President George W. Bush won reelection in 2004. Predictably, open season was soon declared on pollsters, most of whom had forecast an extremely tight race along razor-thin margins. After major miscalculations in the 2016 and 2020 elections, public patience with the whole polling apparatus was wearing thin.

But is such criticism really fair? By this point, there’s a sense that poll-bashing has almost become a national sport. And Robert Preuhs, a Political Science professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, said much of the mudslinging fundamentally misunderstands how polling works and what it is trying to achieve. “The key issue is that we expect precise and definitive answers from polls, which were always meant to be estimates of public opinion,” he said. And besides, he added, many polls this time did get pretty close. Broadly speaking, the aggregate of the 2024 presidential election polls indicated that it was an extremely close race between former Republican President Donald Trump, now the president-elect, and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

The polls indicated the race would come down to seven swing states. And that’s exactly what happened. With 46 state race calls as of Wednesday afternoon, neither Trump nor Harris has won a single state predicted to be a lock for the other candidate. There were no major upsets yet in the Senate map either. Trump’s current popular vote margin is 3.5%, but that could easily narrow as more results come in. Populous states like California still have significant amounts of outstanding votes.

See also >> Yahoo News’ live blog of continued election results The major election modelers looked beyond individual polls — which can vary significantly — to forecast the big picture. As the election approached the closing days, they focused on the swing state polls, averaging them together and applying weights based on factors like recency and historical accuracy. After nearly a decade of fine-tuning, the industry still hasn’t figured out how to reach enough Donald Trump supporters. Pollsters seemed to finally get it right in 2024. After years of bad misses, they said the presidential election would be close, and it was.

In fact, the industry did not solve its problems last year. In 2016, pollsters famously underestimated Donald Trump by about 3.2 points on average. In 2024, after eight years of introspection, they underestimated Trump by … 2.9 points. Many of the most accurate pollsters last year were partisan Republican outfits; many of the least accurate were rigorous university polls run by political scientists. Polls can’t be perfect; after all, they come with a margin of error. But they should not be missing in the same direction over and over.

And chances are the problem extends beyond election polling to opinion surveys more generally. When Trump dismisses his low approval ratings as “fake polls,” he might just have a point. For years, the media have been covering the travails of the polling industry, always with the premise that next time might be different. That premise is getting harder and harder to accept.

Did The 2024 Election Polls Get It Wrong Newsweek

People Also Search

In The Weeks And Days Leading Up To The 2024

Most Political Polls For The 2024 Presidential Election Saw A

As Of Monday, November 11, With Most Votes Now Tallied,

Asian Respondents Also Favored Harris (54% Harris, 39% Trump), As

With Nearly All The Ballots Now Counted In The 2024