Once again, polls missed a decisive slice of Trump voters in 2024
As America’s pollsters and polling aggregators conduct their postmortems on the 2024 presidential election, some are already saying that their pre-election surveys got it right, noting the close results in each of the seven presidential battlegrounds.
As America’s pollsters and polling aggregators conduct their postmortems on the 2024 presidential election, some are already saying that their pre-election surveys got it right, noting the close results in each of the seven presidential battlegrounds.
But there’s a key point that can’t be missed: The polls once again understated the depth of support for President-elect Donald Trump, despite the many changes pollsters made after their 2020 and 2016 misses.
To be sure, this year’s polls overall seem to have missed the mark by less than they did four years ago, and the outcome in the swing states was close enough to be within the margin of error for a considerable number of polls, according to an NBC News Decision Desk analysis.
But the missing Trump supporters in public polls meant that pre-election polling averages did not show Trump’s sweep of the swing states, which is why the outcome felt like such a surprise to some, though we probably shouldn’t have been surprised.
NBC News compared Trump’s support in “likely voter” polls conducted in October and November to the percentage of votes he received in the election at the state and national levels. The pattern is similar to what we saw in pre-election polls in the previous two presidential elections: The average poll understated Trump’s support almost everywhere, and in the seven swing states, the miss was consistently between 2 and 3 percentage points.
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