Even before former President Donald J. Trump emerged as the winner in the presidential race, the numbers on election night showed signs of a victory … for polling.
Over the final weeks of the campaign, pre-election polls consistently pointed to a tight race between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, in both the popular vote and the battleground states. And though the current results are preliminary, and many states are still counting ballots, a close race is what has unfolded.
By Wednesday morning, The New York Times’s forecast model had estimated that Mr. Trump was on track to win the national popular vote by about 1.5 percentage points, meaning the pre-election polls — which, on average, had shown Ms. Harris with a one-point lead — were probably off by roughly two and a half points.
Mr. Trump was also on track to sweep all seven swing states, according to Times estimates, giving him a more comfortable victory in the Electoral College. But that is well within the range of outcomes the polls had suggested. His margins of victory in most of those swing states appeared to be relatively narrow, as the polls had suggested they might be.
Of course, the polls weren’t perfect; they never are. And they sometimes showed Ms. Harris with a slight edge when it turned out that Mr. Trump had the narrow advantage. But a lead of one point in polling is best interpreted as, effectively, a tie, and the polls’ real value in this election cycle was showing that the race was, in fact, very tight.
In an analysis of the preliminary results in states where enough pre-election polls had been conducted to calculate an average, and where a winner had been called by Wednesday morning, the polls were off by an average of three percentage points — within the typical margin of error. They were even closer among battleground states where races had been called, varying about two percentage points from the preliminary results.
Take Wisconsin, the battleground state that clinched the win for Mr. Trump. With more than 95 percent of the expected vote reporting, Mr. Trump was leading Ms. Harris by less than a single percentage point. At 6 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, The Times’s final polling averages had shown Ms. Harris leading in Wisconsin by a point, very close to the current results. Georgia was similarly close, while Mr. Trump appeared to be performing about two or three points better than the polling averages indicated in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Beyond these quantitative measures, it appears the polls were effective at capturing the underlying issues motivating voters this election. The economy was consistently cited as the top issue among voters across polls, which also tended to show voters trusting Mr. Trump more than Ms. Harris on the matter. This was also true of immigration, another top concern; both findings may help explain the former president’s victory. The polls had also reflected demographic realignments that were starting to be verified in precinct-level voting data, showing shifts among certain voting groups, such as Latinos, away from the Democratic Party.
These are still early numbers and a full picture of how the polls performed will depend on final results and the popular vote tally. But for a morning-after, back-of-the-napkin analysis, it’s looking good for the polls, especially after major misses in 2016 and 2020. In both of those election cycles, nearly all of the state-level polling averages underestimated support for Mr. Trump, some by six, seven and even 11 points (in the case of Maine’s Second District in 2020). In comparison, polls coming within two or three points of the result look positively oracular.
While some social media users on Wednesday lamented or mocked the pre-election polls for not predicting Mr. Trump’s win more definitively, that’s neither the intention of polling nor a real possibility in such a closely contested race, said Peter Enns, a professor of government at Cornell and co-founder of the polling firm Verasight.
“When we distill it down to, ‘did they get the winner in a relatively close election,’ it’s a little bit of an unfair test,” Mr. Enns said.
Pre-election polls can be very accurate, but their precision is limited because a certain amount of error is baked into the process. Only a sample of the population is polled, and pollsters can make only an educated guess about who is going to cast a ballot.
“People want polls to deliver a level of precision that they just can’t,” said Lakshya Jain, an election modeler with the analytics website Split Ticket, who added that a miss by two or three points is “as good as polls can really get.”
While it may be frustrating that the polls collectively showed the race as essentially tied — we know someone has to win, after all — a functioning polling ecosystem offers hope for a clearer understanding of the electorate, and a richer understanding of what voters were prioritizing when they decided to send Mr. Trump back to the White House.
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