In 2024 Trump vs Biden rematch, can we believe US polls?
- Measuring the Donald Trump vote has been a years-long headache for US pollsters
- So far in 2024, polls have largely had Trump and President Joe Biden neck and neck
Can we believe the polls? Six months before the US presidential election, pollsters are scrambling to get an accurate read on the people voting for Donald Trump, a group that has systematically eluded them for eight years and counting.
The Republican’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 took the United States and the world by surprise. But it was above all the 2020 election, won by Joe Biden, that forced a reckoning for pollsters.
That vote produced polling errors of “unusual magnitude” – the highest in 40 years for the popular vote, and 20 years for state-level estimates, according to a report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR).
Right up until the eve of the election, and despite corrective measures taken in the wake of 2016, polls overestimated the Biden vote and underestimated support for Trump.
The so-called “shy Trump voter” – too timid to express their preference to pollsters – does not explain the discrepancy, as was suggested in 2016 and again in 2020, says Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute, which publishes surveys with The New York Times.