US election results: How did opinion polls turn out Trump voters? | 2024 US Election News

Before the United States presidential election on Tuesday, public opinion polls had predicted a neck-and-neck race between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

But in the end, Trump cruised to a comfortable victory, defying the majority of the polls. He has won five of the seven swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin — and appears poised to win the remaining two, Arizona and Nevada. Most of these wins are by larger margins than the polls predicted.

And, while most pollsters had predicted a narrow margin between Harris and Trump in the popular vote, nearly all showed Harris ahead. In the end, Trump has a chance to not only win the popular vote – but he did so by a margin of nearly 5 million votes. That's a win no Republican has boasted since George HW Bush in 1988.

In all, Trump won 295 Electoral College votes, comfortably more than the 270 needed to win, while Harris won 226. If he wins Arizona and Nevada as predicted, Trump will end up with 312 Electoral College votes.

So how do opinion polls go wrong – wrong?

What do polls predict about trends?

Most national polls, weeks after the vote, predicted the two candidates dead, deeming the race too close to call.

A few days before the election, some pollsters, such as the poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, were changing slightly and predicted that Harris would probably win, although by a narrow margin of less than 2 percent.

In seven battleground states, Harris was predicted – based on a polling estimate by FiveThirtyEight – to win the majority in traditionally Democrat states, or the Blue Wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump was ahead in the polls in North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, and nothing separated the candidates in Nevada, according to the survey.

On election night, Trump won all three of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Arizona is expected to win well. And he's ahead in Nevada by three percentage points — more than polls predicted.

What about the other states that Trump won?

In Iowa, a Midwestern state that has long been solidly Republican, Selzer and Co, a trusted polling firm run by analyst J Ann Selzer, surprisingly predicted a three-percentage-point lead for Harris over Trump in the closing days of the campaign.

To be sure, it was an outside poll: an Emerson College poll that came out around the same time showed Trump winning the state by nine percent.

But Selzer is widely respected in the polling industry and has repeatedly called Iowa the right way in presidential and Senate races over the decades.

He cited widespread anger among white women over the repeal of hard-won abortion rights by Trump's 2022 Supreme Court nominees, and said undecided women voters were drinking Harris, giving him an edge.

Trump, on his social media channel, Truth Social, criticized Selzer's poll, calling him an “enemy” and saying the poll was “grossly unfair”.

In the end, Trump won the state by 13 percent — more than even the majority of Republican-leaning polls had predicted.

When the polls are so wrong, it “exacerbates the biggest challenge in this race: the perceived lack of voting legitimacy”, Tina Fordham of the risk advisory firm Fordham Global Foresight told Al Jazeera.

What about the states Trump lost?

Pollsters got it wrong even in the few states where Harris won — undercounting Trump's support and thus predicting a larger margin of victory for the vice president in solidly Blue states than what happened in the polls:

• New York: Early polling on Nov. 5 had Harris winning by 16 percent. Won by 11 points.
• New Jersey: Harris, on FiveThirtyEight, was predicted to win by 17 percent. He beat Trump – but only by 5 points.
• New Hampshire: Polls suggested Harris would win by 5 percent. He barely beat Trump by two percentage points.

Did the pollsters warn of possible mistakes?

Yes, pollsters always point out that their polls work within the margin of error in their calculations – about 4 percent in most cases. That means their predictions could be off by 4 percentage points either way: if Harris is shown leading Trump by 48 percent to 44 percent, for example, he could end up tied, or Harris could end up winning by 8 percent in the end.

Nate Silver, who founded the FiveThirtyEight pollster, and now backs the newspaper, the Silver Bulletin, wrote in the New York Times before the vote that his “gut” was with Trump. Silver had predicted it would be long, but it's possible, he noted, that the polls were underestimating the numbers of Trump supporters because they couldn't reach them for the survey.

But in the final days before Nov. 5, Silver was one of many voters who said their models had shifted slightly toward Harris, giving him a 48 percent chance of defeating Trump's 47 percent.

Have polls not done well before?

Yes. Polling in the US began with newspapers collecting local opinions in the 1880s. Predictions have generally been correct, historically.

But lately, they have often made a terrible mistake.

In 2016, opinion polls correctly predicted the popular vote for Hillary Clinton, but she also won, comfortably, in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Trump eventually won. Their prediction that Clinton would win the Electoral College was proven wrong.

Polls are closed in 2020 as well, with the restrictions of COVID-19 severely limiting polls. Most polls correctly predicted that Joe Biden would win the Electoral College and the national vote. But they overestimated support for Democrats “by an extraordinary amount”, according to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), when counting voters who support Trump. Researchers have called it the most accurate poll in 40 years.

Then in 2022, the polls didn't do well the other way around – in the midterm elections.

One poll predicted that Republicans would sweep the House and Senate that year. In the end, the race was very close, at least in the Senate, where neither party won a majority, but the Democrats ended up in control 51-49, with the support of the independents they co-caucus with. Republicans, as predicted, won the House 222 – 213.

Why are polls wrong?

It all depends on who participates in their survey, how representative the voters are, and how truthfully they respond, the researchers say. Without accurate data, polls are meaningless.

As Silver acknowledges in his New York Times column, one key challenge pollsters face is getting enough numbers of potential voters to respond to their polls. Usually, impressions are collected through phone calls, but that has become more difficult thanks to call identity apps that help people screen calls that are seen as spam.

Republicans, in particular, may be less likely than Democrats to talk to the media or respond to polls, and have been underrepresented in past polls, according to AAPOR findings. It doesn't help that Trump has also publicly attacked opinion polls as “fakes”, which may have caused his supporters to turn away from participation. Trump has often attacked the mainstream media, calling the media “the enemy of the state” in 2019.

By contrast, Democrats, especially college-educated people, are more likely to engage, and likely to be overrepresented, analysts say.

Although pollsters are trying to close the participation gap through email and online surveys, some online surveys tend to attract only certain types of participants because they offer compensation, academic Jerome Viala-Guadefroy writes in the research paper The Conversation.

“(That compensation) leads to issues of accuracy and representativeness,” he wrote.

In 2020, the limitations of the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to make surveys more difficult. AAPOR found that states with high voting errors corresponded to states with high numbers of the virus.

Have online betting sites done better than pollsters?

American University Professor and pollster Allan Lichtman who correctly predicted the 2016 election in favor of Trump, admitted that his predictions this time – he had predicted that Harris would win – were wrong. In a post to X on Thursday, Lichtman said he wanted to “examine why the keys are wrong and what we can learn from this mistake”.

Meanwhile, on the Internet, new prediction betting companies, where people can place money on topics such as crypto or candidates, rejoice and praise for accurately predicting the probability that Trump will win. The thousands who gambled on Trump are looking at a combined payout of around $450m.

In the days just before the Nov. 5 vote, the odds of Trump winning have increased on at least five online betting websites, giving, some say, a more realistic picture than the polls.

Last night, Polymarket proved the intelligence of the markets with polls, media, and analysts.

Polymarket has consistently and accurately predicted results ahead of all three, demonstrating the potential of high volume, deeply liquid prediction markets such as those named…

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) November 6, 2024

Polymarket, which also has Nate Silver as one of its advisers, was one of the few to put Trump on a better footing. In a statement to X on Wednesday, Polymarket said it had proven the wisdom of “markets over polls, media and pundits”.

“Polymarket consistently and accurately predicted results ahead of all three, demonstrating the power of high-volume, deeply liquid prediction markets such as those pioneered by Polymarket,” the statement read.

Kalshi, another popular betting site, revealed in the US publications, Fast Company that 28,000 people bet on Harris on its site, while 40,000 bet on Trump. They got it right.