The Polls and the U.S. Presidential Election in 2020 …. and 2024

Abstract

Arguably, the single greatest determinant of U.S. public policy is the identity of the president. And if trusted, polls not only provide forecasts about presidential-election outcomes but can act to shape those outcomes. Looking ahead to the 2024 U.S. presidential election and recognizing that polls before the 2020 presidential election were sharply criticized, we consider whether such harsh assessments are warranted. Initially, we explore whether such polls as processed by the sophisticated aggregator FiveThirtyEight successfully forecast actual 2020 state-by-state outcomes. We evaluate FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts using customized statistical methods not used previously, methods that take account of likely correlations among election outcomes in similar states. We find that, taken together, the pollsters and FiveThirtyEight did an excellent job in predicting who would win in individual states, even those “tipping point” states where forecasting is more difficult. However, we also find that FiveThirtyEight underestimated Donald Trump’s vote shares by state to a modest but statistically significant extent. We further consider how the polls performed when the more primitive aggregator Real Clear Politics combined their results, and then how well single statewide polls performed without aggregation. It emerges that both Real Clear Politics and the individual polls fared surprisingly well.