For the third election in a row, political polls underestimate Donald Trump’s support

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Political polls this year in Florida accurately predicted that President-elect Donald Trump would win the White House, but by tighter margins than he actually did. For other races here, polls were less reliable, with some incorrectly predicting passage of amendments regarding recreational marijuana and abortion rights.

This year marked at least the third consecutive presidential election in which polls underestimated the strength of Republican candidates, including Trump.

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Post-mortem analysis of this year’s pre-election polls reflects the challenges of calculating public opinion, experts said. They underestimated Republican voter turnout in Florida. Democratic voters remained more willing to participate in polls, which may have skewed the results. Polls taken weeks or months before Election Day fail to capture the feelings of late decision-makers.

Opinion polls are influential. They can help politicians understand what the public wants and dictate strategies on spending and political messaging. Publicly released results can also influence perceptions of which candidates or issues are likely to win on Election Day, thereby affecting turnout.

The polls from this election in Florida included the good, the bad and the ugly:

• Nearly every major poll predicted Trump would easily win Florida over Vice President Kamala Harris, by an average of 8%. He actually won by just over 13%. The mid-October poll of 1,510 Florida adults by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie, New York, showed Trump ahead by just 4 percentage points, with a margin of error of 3.6%. That still shows Trump winning, but it far overestimates support for Harris among Democrats.
• Polls were much worse, predicting how close the race would be for Republican Sen. Rick Scott against Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. In late October, the Florida Atlantic University Polling Lab showed Scott winning 50% to 46% with a margin of error of 3.2%. The October Marist poll was even closer, projecting Scott winning 50% to 48%, with a margin of error of 3.6%. Scott actually won by almost 13 points.
• In late October, FAU’s polling lab showed Harris slightly ahead of Trump nationally. Trump actually won both the electoral vote by 312 to 226 and the popular vote by about 2.3 million votes. His polling also showed that Florida’s recreational marijuana amendment barely had enough support to pass (which it didn’t). In late October, the University of North Florida Opinion Lab also showed that Florida’s abortion rights amendment had enough support to pass (it also failed).

Michael Binder, director of the Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida, said this year’s polls slightly underestimated Republican turnout in Florida — a difficult problem every election cycle. That tilted some poll results, he said.

“It doesn’t look good when the directionality is the same, but it’s something we struggle with,” he said.

The 2020 political polls were particularly bad, with the highest errors in 40 years for the national popular vote and the highest in at least 20 years for state-level vote estimates in the presidential, Senate, and Senate elections. governor. Pundits have blamed Republicans’ apparent reluctance to participate in polls, likely following Trump’s example when he said the polls were fake and intended to suppress votes.

The last time the nation’s top pollsters studied the issue in detail, they could identify no obvious answer as to why the polls were so bad: “Conclusive statements are impossible,” wrote the American Association for Public Opinion Research in its November 2022 report. The same group said it will examine 2024 political polls at its next national conference in May in St. Louis.

Kevin Wagner, co-executive director of FAU’s Political Communications and Public Opinion Research Lab, said polls show Democratic senators outperforming in every state, including Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. On Election Day, polls seemed to show the Congressional and Senate elections looking more like the presidential race.

“We expect there to be less ticket sharing. But I mean, there have been even more than you would normally expect, because Democratic Senate candidates won in states that Donald Trump won,” Wagner said.

He said the poll’s inability to predict Scott’s margin of victory in Florida was particularly concerning.

“That’s a question we’re going to have to study a little more and figure out why Sen. Scott’s numbers weren’t more representative of where he ended up,” he said. “Some of these reasons may be due to late decisions, others may be simply due to the way these samples broke down.”

Polling experts said Florida polls may have missed the mark on the state’s controversial amendments to legalize recreational marijuana and enshrine abortion rights because organized opposition to them measures — in each case led by popular Gov. Ron DeSantis — only heated up later. on election day. The DeSantis administration used state resources to combat both efforts.

“We did pretty well,” Binder said. “If we had waited two weeks and polled, you know, a few days before the election, I think we would have gotten a lot better results on (amendments) three and four,” he said.
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The journalist can be contacted at [email protected]. You can make a donation to support our students here.