Nice visuals, but would be even better if you had the margins of error on the polls as error bars. How far off were the results from the corresponding edges of the margins of errors?
I think this is good work, and interesting (and scary). Thanks.
Didn’t pollsters start radically changing their methodologies following 16 and 20? I think adding in 2022 would help here, considering how the midterms were arguably in the opposite direction in terms of polling error.
I’m hoping the polls are wrong the other way this time and that Trump #’s are inflated. I voted early, donated, nagging my undecided and reticent friends and family and postcarded.
While this is good data, it is important to remember that polling error is not always aligned in the same direction (if it is, pollsters could fix that fairly easily). In 08 and 2012, Obama was underestimated, and in 2018 and 22, polls were right on, but people kept trying to unskew to the previous election, so individuals overestimated Republicans despite the polls’ accuracy
Nice visuals, how have you made them?
That’s the reason why a lot of experts are saying a lot of polling data is weighed towards trump this election cycle due to the two previous.
Why take an average of the error over just the last two cycles, and apply it to this time? I mean, if you negate any form of trend, you should gather more cycles.
If the pollsters learn well from their error margins, you might as well extrapolate towards this cycle, delivering completely different results.
This is amazing and depressing work. Thank you for helping me start to cope early.
It’s so odd how just a handful of states basically decide the president. Seems like a broken system, eh?
The fact that Trump’s political career didn’t die on Jan 6, 2021 makes me seriously question what the hell is wrong with people in this country.
If current polls hold then Trump will win the election. Harris needs to hold Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada, as well as flip either Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, or Arizona.
If Trump is still outperforming polls then the election is already out of reach for Harris. Even if he’s not he still has the inside track to win.
You wouldn’t think this based off much of the content you see on this site, but I recommend most people reading this brace for a surprise.
Im amazed it’s still a close match.
James Comey announcing his thing about Clinton’s email also had a huge affect on people voting. If that never happened, Clinton probably would’ve won.
Incredibly well done. Good pace, easy to understand, and really informative data
For the life of my I cannot comprehend why anyone in their right mind would vote for Trump.
Edit: To clearify i am not a US citizin so yeah i do not know anyone who vots in the election. I read and watch a lot online from various sources cause the election is just a personal interest
Regarding 2016:
There was a huge element of apathy. People knew Clinton would win, or at least that Trump would lose, so they didn’t bother to turn up. They answered polls as if they were going to vote, but then when it came down to it, they didn’t bother.
A lot of Bernie supporters were still angry Clinton won the nomination, and had a wacky plan of letting Trump win so people would realize how bad he was and vote for Bernie next time. Some of them even said they were going to “protest vote” for Trump. I don’t think any of them seriously thought he was going to win either.
It reminds me of Brexit, when people were interviewed after it passed, and many people who had voted for it were upset. They said they only voted for it to send a message, they didn’t expect it to actually pass.
I don’t like to engage in “hopium”. I am alarmed by these polls. But I really do think voter engagement is higher this time around.
Having this as a gif is really annoying. Why would you do it like this rather than an infographic? Let me look at the numbers on my own time
Definitely bad news for Harris. Biden was polling ahead all throughout the 2020 cycle and only barely won. She’s losing in a few states with less than 2 weeks to go.
What does that tell you? She’s on track to lose
I wish there was a way to pause the visualization
1. Interesting to note that the polls in 2020 adjusted for their miss at state levels (hence, less error). It is very important to also note that the National polling was pretty accurate in both elections. If that trajectory continues, may be they miss by about 1 point this year?
2. It is also very important to note that 2022 underestimated Democratic support in MIDWEST (aka, in a lot of battleground states). If I have to guess: Roe V Wade. This is typically not a burning issue in either NY or CA (where Democrats underperformed) as the local Govt. always will support the right to choice. But this is a critical issue in Midwest where the local Govt. may or may not support the right to choose. That same situation is still valid in Midwest states.
Post this in /r/politics and witness a new Reddit downvote record.
Those nutters are mainlining hopium so hard their hearts are going to explode before election day. They’re convinced Harris is walking away with 400 electoral votes. Very 2016 vibes in there.
Nobody thinks Harris has it in the bag, I personally think she’ll win, for a variety of reasons including a surge in early voting at record pace in key swing states, mail in voting still being heavily utilized, and younger generations voting and participating more in elections while a lot of trumps core support has died off. Also, trump has never once got the popular vote, lost last time and his pool of supporters has not grown.
It’ll come down to turnout obviously, but including flipping nearly every swing state from last election, the math is pretty rough for him on voter demographics, even non-college educated white males are pulling away from him, and yes, not in massive amounts, but when polls and elections are down to tens of thousands in margins, that matters.
Let’s also not forget that pollsters have radically changed their methodologies after 2020, 2022 being a prime example of that. There also continues to be the issue of younger generations being under sampled and hard to reach. I also think that we have an opposite effect of shy Harris voters over shy Trump voters this cycle.
I’m preparing for the worst, but I feel that Harris will get the win, I do think the electoral vote will be considerably closer, wouldn’t even rule out that whoever wins does so by the thinnest of margins, 270 vs 268, Nebraska and Maine split EV votes might be the tie breaker there.
Expect plenty of stories of voter suppression, polling place intimidation, problems in metro polling places during election days, voter challenges not to mention the red mirage election night that’ll embolden MAGA types to think that overnight shenanigans “stole” the election, once states like PA can actually count their mail in votes and then it flips blue. Also, expect Trump to declare victory before midnight, even though key states haven’t even unsealed their mail in votes.
It’s going to be a wild few days, and then if Trump does lose, expect Jan 6 to be a walk in the park, they aren’t going to crawl back under their rocks.
I also wouldn’t rule out a surprise like an expected red state going blue. My bet would be Ohio, it’s a long shot, but the lakeshore counties will be the ones that carry the state, and since 2016 they’ve gone red (outside Cleveland), but the amount of Harris signs I see all along there have been eye opening.. from Lucas county all the way to Lake County. If Trump does win Ohio, I’d put money on it being 2-3 percentage points at most this time around… Ohio has had some pretty powerful “blue” moments the last two years, including overwhelming support of telling our republican legislators to take a hike on mandating a super majority to pass state amendments, codifying abortion into law, and this year we’re trying to take our gerrymandered state back by getting that issue on the ballot in overwhelming majority, and the Ohio secretary of state is trying every trick in the book to prevent it using shady language on the ballot to confuse uninformed voters. Ohio is over it, we’re still purple, and once we kick our Trump obsession, expect us to be a true swing state again.
Also, this type of data is not exactly iron clad. Clinton was absolutely ahead in 2016, until Comey dropped his October/last minute surprise about emails and then it tanked her right before the vote. Polls only tell part of the story.
I’m not overconfident, I think it’s going to be a barn burner, and the chance of Trump winning again is absolutely a possibility, I just don’t think it’s a lost cause like this data makes it out to be.
Are there individual images to look at?
Trump is unlikely to outperform his polls this year to the same degree, if at all. [Pollster’s have corrected for Trump’s overperformance in a lot of ways](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/upshot/poll-changes-2024-trump.html). Also in 2016/2020 he was polling at 43-44% vote share. Now he is polling at 47-48% vote share. If was to overperform polls to the same degree he would win the popular vote which is not likely to happen. Every election is different, and the polls are always off to some degree (~4% historical average I believe which is a lot). Harris could very well outperform polls this year. Obligatory, forget the polls, VOTE!
Are you naively using polling averages or trying to curate high quality polls?
Also, Trump underperformed his polling significantly in the primaries this year, wouldn’t that suggest that polling probably no longer underestimates him? Especially considering polling of Hayley voters shows that they *aren’t* just going over to Trump after the primary?
Basically: is this data for the sake of data, or is there a reason to think it has any predictive value?
The logic being used here is flawed for a number of reasons. For one, the focus shouldn’t really be on polling avg misses, it should be on the actual results. And in those there was very minimal fluctuation in the percentage of votes Trump got from those states election to election.
AZ 2016: 48.7% AZ 2020: 49.1%
GA 2016: 50.8% GA 2020: 49.2%
MI 2016: 47.5% MI 2020: 47.8%
NV 2016: 45.5% NV 2020: 47.7%
NC 2016: 49.8% NC 2020: 49.9%
PA 2016: 48.2% PA 2020: 48.7%
WI 2016: 47.2% WI 2020: 48.8%
Current polls have him within half a point to 2 points of those numbers. But the logic you’re using would have him DRASTICALLY over performing what we saw it both 2016 and 2020. So it’s far more likely that pollsters have, if fact, fixed the underestimating from previous cycles.
I think the big thing a lot of people are missing is how polling went down in 2022 midterms for the big state-wide races.
On aggregate, the polls were “accurate” and may have had a slight democratic bias. But that’s really obfuscating where the error happened. If we look at “safe” states versus “battleground” states. It tells a wildly different story.
Polling in states like Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all were accurate to even a +7 point Republican bias for several races.
These are fairly damning errors. But the issue in why 2022 gets reported as accurate to democratic biased is that safe states in both directions (California, Florida, New York) has significant democratic bias that countered a lot of these numbers.
If we used 2022’s bias on these races, which also isn’t a fair representation btw, just using it to prove a point, Kamala will win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Nevada easily. While NC, Georgia, and Arizona will be close but hers.
The point is polling every cycle has issues, and they vary state to state and it’s hard to predict how and why things will shake out
I just want to say this was very well presented data. Thank you and nice job.
I’d be interested if the 2022 polling miss was also included. It missed the other way
GET YOUR PEOPLE TO GO VOTE!
This should scare people into voting.
I absolutely hate the transition move to seemingly random percentages. First one the axis is 45% then 10% then 45% then 8% and ending on 6%. It makes it extremely hard yo get an accurate view of just how much difference it actually is comparatively. And the scale being shrunk over time makes the last graph seem so much more extreme than it is.
It’s not beautiful to me, it’s sloppy, misleading and ugly. I’m sorry.
One thing that the OP conspicuously ignored was that this is the first presidential election since Roe v Wade was overturned and we don’t know what effect that will have. The polls which are being trumpeted here as undercounting Trump’s support did the reverse in 2022, the first post Roe v Wade election and the much ballyhooed and MAGA promised Red Wave never materialized because the polls undercounted the support Democrats received from people upset over Roe V Wade.
Am I saying that is going to happen in 2024 as well? No, I don’t know what will happen, and neither does the OP. But to leave that out of the conversation is very suspicious.
![[OC] 2024 Battleground Polls Adjusted for Errors in 2016 & 2020](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/png7gxslqpwd1-1920x1024.gif)
34 comments
Nice visuals, but would be even better if you had the margins of error on the polls as error bars. How far off were the results from the corresponding edges of the margins of errors?
I think this is good work, and interesting (and scary). Thanks.
Didn’t pollsters start radically changing their methodologies following 16 and 20? I think adding in 2022 would help here, considering how the midterms were arguably in the opposite direction in terms of polling error.
I’m hoping the polls are wrong the other way this time and that Trump #’s are inflated. I voted early, donated, nagging my undecided and reticent friends and family and postcarded.
While this is good data, it is important to remember that polling error is not always aligned in the same direction (if it is, pollsters could fix that fairly easily). In 08 and 2012, Obama was underestimated, and in 2018 and 22, polls were right on, but people kept trying to unskew to the previous election, so individuals overestimated Republicans despite the polls’ accuracy
Nice visuals, how have you made them?
That’s the reason why a lot of experts are saying a lot of polling data is weighed towards trump this election cycle due to the two previous.
Why take an average of the error over just the last two cycles, and apply it to this time? I mean, if you negate any form of trend, you should gather more cycles.
If the pollsters learn well from their error margins, you might as well extrapolate towards this cycle, delivering completely different results.
This is amazing and depressing work. Thank you for helping me start to cope early.
It’s so odd how just a handful of states basically decide the president. Seems like a broken system, eh?
The fact that Trump’s political career didn’t die on Jan 6, 2021 makes me seriously question what the hell is wrong with people in this country.
If current polls hold then Trump will win the election. Harris needs to hold Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada, as well as flip either Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, or Arizona.
If Trump is still outperforming polls then the election is already out of reach for Harris. Even if he’s not he still has the inside track to win.
You wouldn’t think this based off much of the content you see on this site, but I recommend most people reading this brace for a surprise.
Im amazed it’s still a close match.
James Comey announcing his thing about Clinton’s email also had a huge affect on people voting. If that never happened, Clinton probably would’ve won.
Incredibly well done. Good pace, easy to understand, and really informative data
For the life of my I cannot comprehend why anyone in their right mind would vote for Trump.
Edit:
To clearify i am not a US citizin so yeah i do not know anyone who vots in the election. I read and watch a lot online from various sources cause the election is just a personal interest
Regarding 2016:
There was a huge element of apathy. People knew Clinton would win, or at least that Trump would lose, so they didn’t bother to turn up. They answered polls as if they were going to vote, but then when it came down to it, they didn’t bother.
A lot of Bernie supporters were still angry Clinton won the nomination, and had a wacky plan of letting Trump win so people would realize how bad he was and vote for Bernie next time. Some of them even said they were going to “protest vote” for Trump. I don’t think any of them seriously thought he was going to win either.
It reminds me of Brexit, when people were interviewed after it passed, and many people who had voted for it were upset. They said they only voted for it to send a message, they didn’t expect it to actually pass.
I don’t like to engage in “hopium”. I am alarmed by these polls. But I really do think voter engagement is higher this time around.
Having this as a gif is really annoying. Why would you do it like this rather than an infographic? Let me look at the numbers on my own time
Definitely bad news for Harris. Biden was polling ahead all throughout the 2020 cycle and only barely won. She’s losing in a few states with less than 2 weeks to go.
What does that tell you? She’s on track to lose
I wish there was a way to pause the visualization
1. Interesting to note that the polls in 2020 adjusted for their miss at state levels (hence, less error). It is very important to also note that the National polling was pretty accurate in both elections. If that trajectory continues, may be they miss by about 1 point this year?
2. It is also very important to note that 2022 underestimated Democratic support in MIDWEST (aka, in a lot of battleground states). If I have to guess: Roe V Wade. This is typically not a burning issue in either NY or CA (where Democrats underperformed) as the local Govt. always will support the right to choice. But this is a critical issue in Midwest where the local Govt. may or may not support the right to choose. That same situation is still valid in Midwest states.
Post this in /r/politics and witness a new Reddit downvote record.
Those nutters are mainlining hopium so hard their hearts are going to explode before election day. They’re convinced Harris is walking away with 400 electoral votes. Very 2016 vibes in there.
Nobody thinks Harris has it in the bag, I personally think she’ll win, for a variety of reasons including a surge in early voting at record pace in key swing states, mail in voting still being heavily utilized, and younger generations voting and participating more in elections while a lot of trumps core support has died off. Also, trump has never once got the popular vote, lost last time and his pool of supporters has not grown.
It’ll come down to turnout obviously, but including flipping nearly every swing state from last election, the math is pretty rough for him on voter demographics, even non-college educated white males are pulling away from him, and yes, not in massive amounts, but when polls and elections are down to tens of thousands in margins, that matters.
Let’s also not forget that pollsters have radically changed their methodologies after 2020, 2022 being a prime example of that. There also continues to be the issue of younger generations being under sampled and hard to reach. I also think that we have an opposite effect of shy Harris voters over shy Trump voters this cycle.
I’m preparing for the worst, but I feel that Harris will get the win, I do think the electoral vote will be considerably closer, wouldn’t even rule out that whoever wins does so by the thinnest of margins, 270 vs 268, Nebraska and Maine split EV votes might be the tie breaker there.
Expect plenty of stories of voter suppression, polling place intimidation, problems in metro polling places during election days, voter challenges not to mention the red mirage election night that’ll embolden MAGA types to think that overnight shenanigans “stole” the election, once states like PA can actually count their mail in votes and then it flips blue. Also, expect Trump to declare victory before midnight, even though key states haven’t even unsealed their mail in votes.
It’s going to be a wild few days, and then if Trump does lose, expect Jan 6 to be a walk in the park, they aren’t going to crawl back under their rocks.
I also wouldn’t rule out a surprise like an expected red state going blue. My bet would be Ohio, it’s a long shot, but the lakeshore counties will be the ones that carry the state, and since 2016 they’ve gone red (outside Cleveland), but the amount of Harris signs I see all along there have been eye opening.. from Lucas county all the way to Lake County. If Trump does win Ohio, I’d put money on it being 2-3 percentage points at most this time around… Ohio has had some pretty powerful “blue” moments the last two years, including overwhelming support of telling our republican legislators to take a hike on mandating a super majority to pass state amendments, codifying abortion into law, and this year we’re trying to take our gerrymandered state back by getting that issue on the ballot in overwhelming majority, and the Ohio secretary of state is trying every trick in the book to prevent it using shady language on the ballot to confuse uninformed voters. Ohio is over it, we’re still purple, and once we kick our Trump obsession, expect us to be a true swing state again.
Also, this type of data is not exactly iron clad. Clinton was absolutely ahead in 2016, until Comey dropped his October/last minute surprise about emails and then it tanked her right before the vote. Polls only tell part of the story.
I’m not overconfident, I think it’s going to be a barn burner, and the chance of Trump winning again is absolutely a possibility, I just don’t think it’s a lost cause like this data makes it out to be.
Are there individual images to look at?
Trump is unlikely to outperform his polls this year to the same degree, if at all. [Pollster’s have corrected for Trump’s overperformance in a lot of ways](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/upshot/poll-changes-2024-trump.html). Also in 2016/2020 he was polling at 43-44% vote share. Now he is polling at 47-48% vote share. If was to overperform polls to the same degree he would win the popular vote which is not likely to happen. Every election is different, and the polls are always off to some degree (~4% historical average I believe which is a lot). Harris could very well outperform polls this year. Obligatory, forget the polls, VOTE!
Are you naively using polling averages or trying to curate high quality polls?
Also, Trump underperformed his polling significantly in the primaries this year, wouldn’t that suggest that polling probably no longer underestimates him? Especially considering polling of Hayley voters shows that they *aren’t* just going over to Trump after the primary?
Basically: is this data for the sake of data, or is there a reason to think it has any predictive value?
The logic being used here is flawed for a number of reasons. For one, the focus shouldn’t really be on polling avg misses, it should be on the actual results. And in those there was very minimal fluctuation in the percentage of votes Trump got from those states election to election.
AZ 2016: 48.7%
AZ 2020: 49.1%
GA 2016: 50.8%
GA 2020: 49.2%
MI 2016: 47.5%
MI 2020: 47.8%
NV 2016: 45.5%
NV 2020: 47.7%
NC 2016: 49.8%
NC 2020: 49.9%
PA 2016: 48.2%
PA 2020: 48.7%
WI 2016: 47.2%
WI 2020: 48.8%
Current polls have him within half a point to 2 points of those numbers. But the logic you’re using would have him DRASTICALLY over performing what we saw it both 2016 and 2020. So it’s far more likely that pollsters have, if fact, fixed the underestimating from previous cycles.
I think the big thing a lot of people are missing is how polling went down in 2022 midterms for the big state-wide races.
On aggregate, the polls were “accurate” and may have had a slight democratic bias. But that’s really obfuscating where the error happened. If we look at “safe” states versus “battleground” states. It tells a wildly different story.
Polling in states like Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all were accurate to even a +7 point Republican bias for several races.
– Georgia Governor: +0.2R
– Georgia Senate: +2.2R
– North Carolina Senate: +1.8R
– Wisconsin Governor: +4.2R
– Wisconsin Senate: +2.6R
– Nevada Governor: +0.7R
– Nevada Senate: +3.7R
– Arizona Governor: +3.3R
– Arizona Senate: +3.8R
– Pennsylvania Governor: +3.4R
– Pennsylvania Senate: +5.2R
– Michigan Governor: +7.3R
These are fairly damning errors. But the issue in why 2022 gets reported as accurate to democratic biased is that safe states in both directions (California, Florida, New York) has significant democratic bias that countered a lot of these numbers.
If we used 2022’s bias on these races, which also isn’t a fair representation btw, just using it to prove a point, Kamala will win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Nevada easily. While NC, Georgia, and Arizona will be close but hers.
The point is polling every cycle has issues, and they vary state to state and it’s hard to predict how and why things will shake out
I just want to say this was very well presented data. Thank you and nice job.
I’d be interested if the 2022 polling miss was also included. It missed the other way
GET YOUR PEOPLE TO GO VOTE!
This should scare people into voting.
I absolutely hate the transition move to seemingly random percentages. First one the axis is 45% then 10% then 45% then 8% and ending on 6%. It makes it extremely hard yo get an accurate view of just how much difference it actually is comparatively. And the scale being shrunk over time makes the last graph seem so much more extreme than it is.
It’s not beautiful to me, it’s sloppy, misleading and ugly. I’m sorry.
One thing that the OP conspicuously ignored was that this is the first presidential election since Roe v Wade was overturned and we don’t know what effect that will have. The polls which are being trumpeted here as undercounting Trump’s support did the reverse in 2022, the first post Roe v Wade election and the much ballyhooed and MAGA promised Red Wave never materialized because the polls undercounted the support Democrats received from people upset over Roe V Wade.
Am I saying that is going to happen in 2024 as well? No, I don’t know what will happen, and neither does the OP. But to leave that out of the conversation is very suspicious.
Comments are closed.