Polls have consistently indicated that this year’s presidential race is exceedingly close.
At the same time, there have been a few murmurs among analysts that the election endgame could repeat that of 1980, when pollsters erroneously projected a close race between President Jimmy Carter and California's former Republican governor, Ronald Reagan.
That election ended in a near-landslide for Reagan, who won the popular vote by nearly 10 percentage points. The outcome, said the New York Times, left Americans scratching their heads “over how Ronald Reagan won an overwhelming victory in what was supposed to be a close presidential election.”
It was an outcome pollsters had not foreseen, and afterward, they quarreled openly about why their surveys had failed to provide an accurate sense of what the election would bring. “Pollsters spat over why they erred so badly,” read a post-election headline in the Los Angeles Times.
Could this year’s race turn out similarly, in a decisive result unanticipated by the polls? Might the expected tight race morph into a clear popular vote victory, if not a landslide, for former President Trump or Vice President Harris?
As Nate Cohn of the New York Times has pointed out, if polls are even modestly in error this cycle, the result could be “very........