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But the news is not all good. While polls had a historically good year in terms of error, they had a medium-to-bad one in terms of statistical bias, which measures whether polls are missing the outcome in the same direction. By our math, state polls overestimated support for Harris by an average of 2.7 points on margin in competitive states.

That's lower than the statistical bias of the polls in 2016 and 2020, which underestimated Trump by 3.2 and 4.1 points, respectively. But it's higher than the bias in the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections.

This is not great news for pollsters. It means they did not fully solve their problems from 2016 and 2020 of getting enough Trump supporters to take their polls . While those problems may have been abated by pollsters weighting their data more aggressively or improving their sampling designs, they are still obviously present. You can really see this if you look at the pattern of polling bias in the competitive states from 2016 to 2024:

While pollsters managed to reduce their bias in some states, especially Wisconsin, from 2020 to 2024, the pattern in the industry is still the same: Pollsters are having a hard time reaching the types of people who support Trump.

You should expect errors in polling

While bias in the polling industry is troubling, it is not necessarily unexpected — especially after the last few elections. And it's worth repeating that a 3-point error on the margin is indeed very small historically. Political pollsters have designed a tool that, on average, can measure public opinion among hundreds of millions of people to within 1.5 percent of its \"true\" value (converting vote margin to vote share). When you think about it that way, it's actually remarkable that polls are as accurate as they are.

After the 2020 election, a year in which America's pollsters faced their worst performance since 1980, the American Association of Public Opinion Research (the professional society for pollsters and survey researchers) issued a warning to people trying to predict election outcomes in 2022 and 2024. \"Polls are often misinterpreted as precise predictions,\" it said. \"It is important in pre-election polling to emphasize the uncertainty by contextualizing poll results relative to their precision.... Most pre-election polls lack the precision necessary to predict the outcome of semi-close contests.\"

In other words, polls are simply not up to the task of dispositively determining the result of a close race before it happens. In such a case, the margin between candidates would be too small for observers to conclude that one candidate was reliably ahead, given the inherent uncertainty in polling.

Let's put this note of caution in the context of the 2024 election. At first glance, it may seem like polls had a bad year because they pointed to a close election and Trump looks like he will cruise to a 312-226 win in the Electoral College. But as I wrote last week, because he led in the Sun Belt swing states and was tied in Pennsylvania, polls didn't really even need to underestimate Trump at all for him to win the election. And, I warned, if they underestimated him by 2 points — which would be small compared to other misses historically — he could sweep all seven swing states.

Well, it looks like that is exactly what happened. In fact, it was the modal outcome in our final forecast. AAPOR's warning is more relevant today than ever.

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