Donald Trump’s shocking Election Day victory wasn’t the only comeback on Election Day. The polling industry, which suffered serious black eyes after drastically understating Trump’s support in both the 2016 and 2020 contests, came through in 2024 by correctly gauging the extent to which voters would cast their ballots for the president elect.

“Polls did pretty well, and performance seems to be getting better as the vote-counting continues,” Dr. Christopher Wlezien, a professor of government at the University of Texas in Austin, told Salon. “Using the final FiveThirtyEight numbers, national polls appear to be off by 2.3% points and polls in swing states about 2.5% on average. These are below average errors, e.g., the average error in the last week’s polls for all presidential elections between 1952 and 2020 is 2.5%.”

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The bad news for the polling industry is that, to the extent that the polls were off, it was once again by understating Trump’s support. Yet this time there is an important difference: The polls were only off to the degree that one expects during massive contests such as a presidential election. Like all surveys attempting to accurately measure public opinion, polls depend on selecting a representative sample of the population in question. Some will certainly get it closer than others — at the time of this writing, for example, the polling firms J. L.........

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