US polling organizations once again underestimated Donald Trump's electoral performance, but some surveys dramatically underestimated his support in crucial battleground states. J. Ann Selzer was the most extreme in her underestimation in the final poll ahead of Monday's Election Day (NASDAQ:MNDY), which reported Vice President Kamala Harris beating Trump by 3 percentage points in Iowa, as reported by a New York Times article published on Monday (NYSE:NYT).
According to the election result from AP News, the poll missed by 16 points, winning the state by 13.2 points for Trump over Harris's 42.7 percent.
"The poll findings we produced for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom did not match what the Iowa electorate ultimately decided in the voting booth today," Selzer said in a statement on Tuesday. "I'll be reviewing data from multiple sources to learn why that happened."
Another major miss came from the New York Times/Siena College poll released on Sunday, two days before the election, which indicated that Harris was ahead by clear margins in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin, with Pennsylvania and Michigan tied.
Trump, however ended up winning or leading in all those states.
Even in reliably Democratic states, significant errors were evident, Xinhua news agency reported.
In New Jersey, discrepancies in polling were particularly acute, with one Rutgers survey mid-October coming in double digits short of Trump's final percentage. In Maryland, The Independent (LON:IOG) reported Trump overperforming his polling average by 4.1 percent while Harris underperformed by 1.2 percent.
James Johnson, head of J.L. Partners, one of the few polling firms which got Trump right, told Newsweek Wednesday that the error came from familiar problems: "The key thing is people made the same mistakes they did in 2016. They understated the Trump voter who is less likely to be engaged politically, and crucially, more likely to be busy, not spending 20 minutes talking to pollsters."
White Democrats were 16 percent more likely to respond than white Republicans," Vox notes, citing a note by Nate Cohn, chief polling analyst of New York Times, indicating structural bias in their survey response rates.
Some pollsters still protested that the aggregate polling data wasn't entirely wrong even by those measures. Yahoo News reported Wednesday that key election models had the race as essentially a toss-up, with FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin each giving Harris 50 per cent odds of winning. Split Ticket put her chances at 53 per cent, while The Economist estimated 56 percent.
The final Yahoo News/YouGov survey shows that Trump and Harris are tied at 47% among likely voters, with 6% either backing third-party candidates or undecided. Yahoo News reports FiveThirtyEight analysis that presidential election polls have usually been off by about 4 points on average since 2000.
Online betting markets appear to have had a better feel for the odds of Trump. Major bookmakers Betfair, Kalshi, Polymarket, PredictIt, and Smarkets all gave Trump better-than-even odds of winning on election eve.
Misses in the polling are coming under renewed criticism over the industry.
Comedy Central host Jon Stewart caught the public frustration during his election night broadcast. "I don't ever want to hear, 'We've corrected for the overcorrection with the voters.'"
As of Wednesday afternoon, Trump's popular vote margin stood at 3.5 per cent, though that could narrow as more results come in from populous states such as California, according to Yahoo News. The former president has won five of the seven main battleground states, with Nevada and Arizona still to be called.
In fact, survey experts have even questioned the profession's ability to catch up with the changing behavior and communication patterns of voters, especially less engaged ones, as it has proven very challenging to be as accurate as possible about polling support for Mr. Trump, who has defied many predictions and kept the competition rife.
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