If the current popular vote results hold, President-elect Donald Trump will surpass national pollsters’ expectations by at least 3 percentage points.
Once again, it appears the pollsters missed the mark on President-elect Donald Trump.
On Nov. 5, it became clear Trump would win the Electoral College. As of about 5 p.m. ET on Nov. 6, The Associated Press had yet to call the race in Arizona and Nevada. Nevertheless, Trump will capture at least 295 electoral votes, and he is trending to sweep all seven battleground states.
On Oct. 25, leading national pollsters told The Epoch Times the race was too close to call. On Nov. 5, pollster Nate Silver wrote in his Silver Bulletin newsletter that Vice President Kamala Harris had a slightly better chance of winning the election than Trump did.
“Who’s gonna win the election?” Silver wrote. “Well, honestly, we don’t know.”
An average of the top national polls compiled and published by the media organization Real Clear Politics said the Democratic Party’s nominee was leading Trump nationally by about 0.1 percentage points.
The same average showed the presidential race within the polling margin of error in all seven battleground states. Harris held a slight lead in both Michigan at 0.5 percent, and Wisconsin at 0.4 percent.
The results are still coming in and subject to change, but according to the AP’s results published on Wednesday afternoon, Trump has won Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He is on track to win in Arizona and Michigan if current trends hold up once all ballots are counted.
Again, the tallies are not final, but Trump is on track to win the national popular vote by a 3.6 percentage point margin. No Republican Party candidate has prevailed in the popular vote since President George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004.
If the national vote tally remains close to the current margin, Trump will have beaten the pollsters’ expectations by 3.6 percent.
In the battleground states the AP has called, Trump beat the polls by an average margin of 1.2 points.
Pollsters who previously spoke with The Epoch Times said they had recognized the failures of their past polls and were working to correct them in 2024. Leaders of the Siena College Research Institute and Suffolk University Political Research Center said that previous polling undersampled and underweighted likely Trump supporters, leading to misses.
In a previous interview, Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports’ head pollster, said his company’s polling predicted Trump would win the popular vote.
Mitchell did not respond to a request from The Epoch Times for comment by publication time.
However, on his X account, Mitchell said Nov. 6 was day one of “another cycle of being proven accurate.”
“Will we receive, from the industry, an olive branch or more attacks this morning?” Mitchell asked on social media.
He went on to say that the blowout loss should not be blamed on Harris.
“She wasn’t a perfect candidate, but let’s be honest, she probably did as well as she could,” Mitchell said on X.
“She saved Democrats from an even bigger [Republican] landslide. [President Joe] Biden and the Democrats made this mess.”