With nearly all ballots counted in the 2024 election, we can fully assess the performance of national and battleground polls this cycle.
Verdict: They weren’t perfect, but they were more right than wrong — especially given the voting industry’s problems and recent releases.
Let’s start with the presidential horse race numbers. The NBC News’ latest national survey Donald Trump and Kamala Harris each had 49%, nationally tied RealClearPolitics average Harris got 48.7% and Trump got 48.6% in the two-way contest. And New York Times average Harris had 49%, Trump 48%.
As it stands now, the actual popular vote tally, which you’d expect to change slightly during the latest ballot count: Trump 49.9%, Harris 48.3%.
Historically, the 2024 national polls — on average — slightly overstated support for Harris and narrowly understated Trump, but they showed one of the best presidential performances in a decade. Pew Research Center.
And it was certainly better than the big miss of the 2020 vote.
The battleground polls weren’t too far off either, although their losses were slightly larger than what we saw in the national poll.
If there’s a sense that the polls are wrong in 2024, it’s less about the false impression that political horse race polls can be accurate measures of polling error than the actual rate — say, 49%-48% or 50%- 48 % results can perfectly predict who will win and by how much.
Given polls’ margins of error, historically low response rates in reaching voters, various assumptions about voters and, yes, past polling results, this kind of accuracy has become an expectation from political polls. fool’s errand.
In other words, all those 49%-48% and 50%-48% results can tell us is that the race is close.
This is exactly what presidential elections are proving to be on a national scale and in key battlegrounds.
What else came out right in the poll?
In addition to reporting that the 2024 presidential election is competitive and uncertain, the polls also captured the political atmosphere shaping the contest.
That includes an electorate that largely sees the nation headed in the wrong direction, with incumbent Joe Biden, whose approval rating is stuck in the 40s — a historic danger zone for the party that controls the White House.
Apparently, the NBC News Exit Poll found 73% of voters said they were angry or dissatisfied with the direction of the country, while only 40% said they approved of Biden’s job performance.
In addition, the polls predicted many of the key demographic trends that will determine the 2024 election, including Trump’s success with Latino voters.
The NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC Latino poll It was among polls showing Trump winning well before the election. Many polls have caught early on Biden and the Democrats’ relative struggle with young voters, especially among young people, compared to other recent polls.
Another thing the polls got right about the 2024 election was the Democratic candidates. consecutively surplus Biden (when he was in the race) and then Harris (once he was nominated), as well as Republican candidates who underperformed Trump in the polls.
That dynamic played out in the election, with Democratic Senate candidates winning four states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin — despite Harris losing those states.
What polls did wrong
But surveys, including NBC News surveyerred in exaggerating the size of the gender gap in support for Harris among female voters and for Trump among men.
according to exit pollHarris won women voters by 8 points, while Trump won men by 13 points — a 21-point gender gap that matched the last presidential election. That was smaller than the 30-point gender gap the NBC News poll showed.
(So there was when combined with race and education, Harris won white women with a college degree by 16 points and Trump won white men without a college degree by 40 points — a whopping 56-point gap between the two disparate groups. .)
Most importantly, the polls have once again reduced Trump’s support, albeit at a lower rate than in 2020. This happened despite the recalibration of voting materials and the use of new measuring methods in Trump’s polls to avoid missing voters.
Still, this was the first presidential term in which multiple polls showed Trump either ahead or essentially tied — that wasn’t the case in 2016 or 2020, though those elections turned out that way in many contests.
Mixed record on Party ID
One of the biggest differences in the 2024 election was the national polls (including NBC’s CNBC and The Wall Street Journal) shows Republicans with an advantage in party identification compared to other national polls in which Democrats lead in party identification.
It was the latter group of polls that typically showed Harris ahead of Trump, though within the margin of error.
But in the end, according to exit polls, Republicans won the party ID card.
That was the main story in the 2024 election: There were more self-identified Republican voters than Democratic voters.