Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are in a dead-heat race for the White House, according to polls that show them nearly tied both nationally and in every battleground state likely to decide the election—a scenario that could lead to a sweep for either candidate if polling errors from previous elections repeat.
Former President Donald Trump greets supporters during a campaign rally at Lee’s Family Forum on ... [+]
Polling averages currently show Harris leading Trump by 1.2 points nationally, while Trump is up in the swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona, and Harris is ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada, all with margins of 2.3 points or less, according to Five Thirty Eight averages, meaning that if polls are off by just two points in favor of one candidate, they could win by a landslide.
If polls are off by as much as they were in 2016, Trump could win every battleground state except Nevada by anywhere from two to seven points more than polling averages estimate, while Harris could win Nevada by two points more, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Trump would win by anywhere from one to three points more with 2020’s polling errors in all battleground states except Georgia, which he would still claim, but by one point less than survey averages predict.
Some pollsters predict surveys overly favor Trump this year—political analyst and pollster Evan Roth Smith told Bloomberg he expects any polling error to favor Harris, citing polls’ inability to predict potentially high turnout among Black voters, referencing 2012 polls that underestimated former President Barack Obama’s win by about six points.
In the 2020 election, most national polls accurately predicted Biden would win the popular vote, but overestimated by how much to “an unusual magnitude,” according to a study by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, which found polls in the final two weeks before the election were wrong in either direction by an average of 4.5 points for national popular vote polls and 5.1 points for state-level presidential polls.
There’s no consensus on why the polling errors occurred, the report found, since there’s no way to compare survey respondents to those who didn’t respond, because there’s no information on non-respondents since they didn’t participate, though the group theorizes that Trump supporters were less likely to participate, in part because of distrust in polling promoted by Trump.
There’s a chance that pollsters overcompensate to make up for the belief that Trump supporters are under-represented.
Statistician Nate Silver predicts either candidate has a 60% chance of winning at least six of several battlegrounds, he wrote in a piece for The New York Times in which he predicts a win for Trump, but warns “50-50 is the only responsible forecast.”
93%. That’s the share of national polls that overstated Biden’s support in 2020, according to Pew Research.
Pollsters have taken steps to correct errors made in the 2016 and 2020 elections, including expanding polling methods to text and mail and making statistical adjustments for under-represented groups, The New York Times reported. They also benefit from the availability of data on voting trends in previous elections, including who voted, how and party registration changes. The pandemic was also thought to be a factor in 2020 polling errors, as more Democrats followed protocols and stayed home than Republicans, making them available to answer polls, The New York Times noted.
Election-year polling isn’t always wrong—in 2008, the national polling average underestimated Obama’s win by less than one point, according to The Times. Surveys on the 2022 midterms were more accurate than any cycle since at least 1998, according to Five Thirty Eight.
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