On Election Night, Donald Trump won a straightforward — if not overwhelming — victory over Kamala Harris in both the Electoral College and the national popular vote. We won’t have the final 2024-election results for at least a week, as ballots are still being counted. But the results we have so far can give us a preliminary idea of how accurate the polls were this year. Here, how the pollsters anticipated various outcomes.
The national polling averages (representing a simulation of the national popular vote) all showed Harris with an advantage: She led by 1.2 percent per FiveThirtyEight, one percent per Nate Silver, 2 percent according to the Washington Post (which rounds numbers), and one percent according to the New York Times (which also rounds numbers). RealClearPolitics, which, unlike the other outlets, doesn’t weigh polls for accuracy or adjust them for partisan bias, showed Harris leading by 0.1 percent.
At the moment, Trump leads Harris in the national popular vote by 3.5 percent (51 to 47.5 percent). That margin is likely to decline given the historic tendency of late-counted mail and provisional ballots (particularly in California) to skew Democratic by a significant margin, a phenomenon called the “blue shift.” But even if Trump’s margin is shaved by a full percentage point (not a bad guess), the polls were off by 3 to 4 percent. According to a historical analysis from FiveThirtyEight, the average polling error in presidential elections from 1972 to 2020 has been 2.3 percent.
So it does not appear........