January 1, 2025Open Access

An Analysis of the U.S. 2024 Polls

Key Points

Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election despite narrow predictions by polls, underscoring performance errors.
Polls consistently misrepresented Trump's support in previous elections, showing substantial bias toward Democrats.
Analysis of polling data from multiple elections indicates a need for improved accuracy in future polling approaches.
Findings highlight the persistent challenge of accurately gauging voter sentiment in an evolving political landscape.

Abstract

In 2024, for the third U.S. Presidential election in a row, the polls under-predicted Donald Trump’s performance. In 2016, Trump won a surprising victory, winning several midwestern states he was tabbed to lose. In 2020, Trump lost by a surprisingly close margin in an election he was supposed to lose badly. In 2024, the polls pointed to a narrow loss by Trump, when he won by a narrow margin. In an analysis of the polls of 2020 in this journal 1, I showed that the miscall of the 2020 election could be attributed to (1) polls that were too rich in Democrats, (2) Shy Trumpers and (3) poll-specific bias. In this paper, I look at the polls of 2024.

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Cite This Study

A Wed, study studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6941adf50f5af7fd17df6048 https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.33790/jpspo1100126