Donald Trump “may have been a little underestimated, but I think that 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.
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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 around two points” in key states, summarizes Pedro Azevedo, responsible for 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 stage of the ballot count, he is ahead by 2 points.
In North Carolina, polls predicted a +1.2 point margin for Trump. He wins with 3 points more than Harris.
In Wisconsin, the Democrat was in the lead with +0.4 points. Donald Trump is +0.9 points ahead.
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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 conducted by the New York Times with Siena College, “white Democrats were 16% more likely to respond (to pollsters) than white Republicans,” a disparity that became more pronounced during the campaign, the daily wrote. 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. In the end, Trump won by more than ten points.
“Those who decided at the last moment may have chosen Trump in the last days of the campaign, after the end of (our) interviews,” tried to explain J. Ann Selzer, head of this opinion survey missed, to the local Des Moines Register newspaper.
