2024 polls were accurate but still underestimated Trump

[TheProle]

https://abcnews.go.com/538/2024-polls-accurate-underestimated-trump/story?id=115652118

Despite the early narrative swirling around in the media, 2024 was a pretty good year to be a pollster. According to 538's analysis of polls conducted in competitive states* in which over 95 percent of the expected vote was counted as of Nov. 8 at 6 a.m. Eastern, the average poll conducted over the last three weeks of the campaign missed the margin of the election by just 2.94 percentage points. In the seven main swing states (minus Arizona, which is not yet at 95 percent reporting), pollsters did even better: They missed the margin by just 2.2 points.

This measure, which we call "statistical error," measures how far off the polls were in each state without regard for whether they systematically overestimated support for one candidate. And by this metric, state-level polling error in 2024 is actually the lowest it has been in at least 25 years. By comparison, state-level polls in 2016 and 2020 had an average error close to 4.7 percentage points. Even in 2012, which stands out as a good year for both polling and election forecasting, the polls missed election outcomes by 3.2 percentage points.

[live love laugh]

1. Which polls? The "average poll' is a bunch of malarkey.

[TheProle]

2. I mean, the story has the supporting details. Click the link?

[live love laugh]

7. Yep it's a bunch of BS with a misleading headline from a propagandist media outlet

The article says polls were “accurate” but underestimated Trump ....

Polls changed their methods away from phone calls to online polls and focus groups.

One notable pollster that does still use RDD is Selzer & Co., which had Vice President Kamala Harris leading President-elect Donald Trump by 3 points in its final poll of Iowa this year. Trump ended up winning the state by about 13 points, making for a 16-point error. It looks possible that Selzer's poll had too many Democrats and college-educated voters in it, factors the firm generally does not attempt to correct for due to Selzer's philosophy of "keeping [her] dirty hands off the data" (to be fair, this approach had worked excellently until this year; Selzer is one of the top-rated pollsters in 538's pollster ratings).

I will be taking just a broad look at how polls did in states where the results are final or nearly final. That means we won't assess the accuracy of national polls yet,

Another factor is that pollsters are increasingly balancing their samples on both demographic and political variables, such as individuals' recalled vote in the last election...this can cause some strange results, it generally stabilizes the polls and produces fewer outliers than one would expect by random chance alone.

.

If a poll isn’t random then how representative is it?

...the news is not all good. While polls had a historically good year in terms of error, they had a medium-to-bad one in terms of statistical bias, which measures whether polls are missing the outcome in the same direction. By our math, state polls overestimated support for Harris by an average of 2.7 points on margin in competitive states.... It means ...not... getting enough Trump supporters to take their polls .

...

...Pollsters are having a hard time reaching the types of people who support Trump.

In other words, polls are simply not up to the task of dispositively determining the result of a close race before it happens.

[WarGamer]

3. Days before the election I said...

With the polls so close... if they're undercounting Trump support again... he wins big. I hope the pollsters are accounting for the Hidden Trump voter effect.

[TheProle]

5. Yep.

The bottom line is that the people who shouted down those posting polls, claiming the polls were a MSM manipulation to create the illusion of a horse race were not doing the party any favors.

[orange jar]

4. The emergence of Trump has put polling into murky waters.

I'm not a polls truther or anything, but it's interesting how Trump has the unique effect of having a sizable number of "hidden" supporters that leads to polls underestimating his true support. It’s like, people may consciously know that he's distasteful, crass, and a national embarrassment — but they vote for him, for whatever reason, in secret because they're afraid of others knowing.

Not sure what that says about our current political environment, but I'm sure there's something there. I'm sure there have been political figures who have had a similar effect before ("embarrassed Nixon voters" comes to mind), but this seems like a fairly unique phenomenon.

I only wish more people had secretly voted for Harris. I can't tell if the lack of such is a good thing, a bad thing, or both. Maybe it says something about how Americans view her character; she wasn't off-putting enough for voters to feel embarrassed voting for her.

[Cosmocat]

6. I posted here repeatedly

That what the polls were showing (coin flip) was what I was seeing, and that many here were greatly under estimating his support.