Many political pollsters were blindsided by President-elect Donald Trump’s polling performance following the Nov. 5 election, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Most pollsters repeatedly predicted that the election would come down to a razor thin margin and did not anticipate such a huge win, according to the WSJ. This marks the third presidential election in a row in which pollsters have underestimated voter’s support for Trump.
“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,” Josh Clinton, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, said, the WSJ reported.
The president-elect won his reelection bid against Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday, reaching 270 electoral votes after securing several key swing states, according to several election forecasters. Harris officially conceded to Trump in a Wednesday speech to her supporters.
In the 2016 election, pollsters underestimated Trump’s support from lower-education and working-class white people in key states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, according to a November 2016 analysis published by Pew Research Center. In the 2020 election, many polls overstated President Joe Biden’s lead, and Trump’s strength was “not fully accounted for” in many preelection polls, according to Pew.
Michael Bailey, a professor at Georgetown University, said that pollsters failed to anticipate support for Trump among Latino and younger voters, according to BBC News. Trump’s popularity was also underestimated in less closely-watched parts of the U.S., according to BBC.
“At a glance, in the battleground states, polls ran a little hot for Harris but really not so bad, but when you dig deeper, it’s all a little less impressive,” Bailey said, BBC reported.
Harris was incorrectly predicted to lead Trump in Iowa by 3 points, at 47% to his 44%, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll published Nov. 2. Trump ended up winning Iowa’s six electoral votes on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.
“These models that assume so heavily that we’re going to get a repeat… they’re a disaster when there’s a big change,” Bailey told BBC.
“We didn’t see this coming perfectly,” Clinton said to the WSJ about this year’s polls, “but it’s very hard given the coarseness of the instrument we have here.”
Some election experts previously questioned if support for Trump would be measured accurately by pollsters ahead of the election. Trump was often favored by likely voters on issues such as immigration and the economy in surveys published leading up to election night.
This year, many pollsters were worried about overestimating Trump’s support after the results of the 2020 presidential election, but ended up underestimating it, according to The Times of London.
“They obviously didn’t work, and I have to say we didn’t have confidence that they would work,” Douglas Rivers, chief scientist for YouGov, said of attempts to weight the polls to better capture Trump’s support base, The Times reported.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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