For the third US presidential election in a row, polls underestimated the vote for Donald Trump, which remains difficult to assess despite a slight improvement in opinion polls.
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“They failed to give the main information: the generalized push by Donald Trump,” notes Michael Bailey, professor of political science at Georgetown University.
More than 90% of American counties voted more for the Republican billionaire than in 2020, according to the New York Times.
And the former Republican president is well on his way to winning the seven key states of the election while the latest polls put him neck and neck with Democrat Kamala Harris.
But in five of these states where the result is known, Donald Trump’s victory was by one, two or three percentage points, often within the margin of error.
Donald Trump “may have been a little underestimated, but I think the polls, collectively, ended up seeing things pretty well,” said Kyle Kondik, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.
“The polls suggested that Trump had a significant chance of winning, and he won,” he adds.
Two points
The pollsters were playing big this year, after two big successive failures: they had not anticipated Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and had overestimated the margin by which Joe Biden had won in 2020.
“Trump this time was underestimated by about two points” in key states, summarizes Pedro Azevedo, head of polls in the United States for the company Atlas.
In Pennsylvania, the latest average of polls carried out by the RealClearPolitics site gave the Republican in the lead with a margin of 0.4 percentage points. At this point in the ballot count, he is ahead by two points.
In North Carolina, polls predicted a +1.2 point margin for Trump. He wins with three points more than Harris.
In Wisconsin, the Democrat was in the lead with +0.4 points. Donald Trump is +0.9 points ahead.
White and Latino vote
The heart of the problem has not changed since the resounding arrival of Donald Trump on the American political scene: a segment of his electorate refuses to participate in opinion surveys.
In the latest surveys carried out by the New York Times with Siena College, “white Democrats were 16% more likely to respond [aux sondeurs] than white Republicans”, a disparity which became more pronounced during the campaign, wrote the daily two days before the election.
Although pollsters tried to compensate for these flaws with statistical adjustment solutions, this was clearly not enough.
“The polls have clearly underestimated Trump’s progress among the Hispanic electorate,” notes Pedro Azevedo, highlighting the Republican’s greater than expected victory in Nevada and Florida.
He also thinks that this is still the case for white voters, particularly rural ones, and uses the example of Iowa in particular. A poll on Saturday gave Kamala Harris the winner by three small points in this solidly Republican state. Ultimately, Trump won by more than 10 points.
“Those who decided at the last moment may have chosen Trump in the final days of the campaign, after the end of [nos] interviews,” tried to explain J. Ann Selzer, responsible for this failed opinion survey, to the local newspaper Des Moines Register.
“Latinos and white and rural voters are often seen as intermittent voters, which means they may have been underrepresented in pollster samples,” concludes Mr. Azevedo.
