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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/us/elections/2024-polls-grades.html
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Despite a pretty accurate year, the pre-election polls once again underestimated support for Donald Trump. Does that make it a successful polling cycle, or not?
Dec. 30, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
Just after Election Day, Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Wisconsin, received a lot of requests for media interviews.
“I got at least three, if not four, reporter interviews premised on: ‘The polls were wrong again. How bad were they this year?’” Dr. Franklin said.
But overall, the polls had a pretty good year. In five of the seven swing states, and nationally, the final averages of polls aggregated by The New York Times missed the actual presidential election margin by less than three percentage points. All of the swing state results were within the typical margin of error.
Yet Donald J. Trump’s sweep of the swing states and decisive Electoral College win, along with his popular vote victory, left many voters with the feeling that the polls missed the mark by not conclusively pointing to a Trump win.
The Times talked with six top pollsters, who graded the industry’s performance this year between a C+ and an A- (their analyses were roughly the same; some were just admittedly tougher graders).
They are largely optimistic about the future. Each election cycle provides a new opportunity to learn and tweak polling methods, they said. And political polling has always attracted ire: In any given poll, somebody is bound to be unhappy to see the results. Here are some of their biggest takeaways from 2024 and where they see the industry heading.
David Paleologos, Suffolk University Political Research Center
Grade he gave to 2024’s polling: B+
“Electorally, it was a blowout, but the margins in the different swing states were miniscule.”
Ashley Koning, Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University
Grade she gave to 2024’s polling: B+
“We had relied on phone calling for so long, and the tides have really turned.”
Lee Miringoff, Marist Institute for Public Opinion
Grade he gave to 2024’s polling: A-
“If we weren’t in a roughly 50-50 country, and somebody said a candidate was going to win by 20 points and they won by 14, that would be a big miss and no one would really care.”
