From deadlock to landslide: Trump's big margin still played out in line with pre-election polling

Matthew Medsger, Boston Herald on Nov 6, 2024

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With his second election victory, former President Donald Trump seems to have defied the odds to perform the improbable and take both the popular vote and Electoral College after previously losing the White House.

However, a look at the numbers show that Tuesday night’s results fell well within the margins of polling, which never showed either Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris with a definitive lead but did indicate either could end up running away with the election.

“There was a lot of uncertainty about how all of this would go,” University of New Hampshire presidential historian Dante Scala told the Herald. “When you look at the polls, and everything is showing you a jump ball, well that’s just one possible outcome. But, we also know, if you understand polling, that it’s possible that there could be some error in there or the possibility that it might go one way or the other.”

According to Scala, polling in a state like New Hampshire proved fairly accurate, with Harris taking the state but Republican Kelly Ayotte winning the gubernatorial contest just as surveys suggested they might, and that can be seen across a number of more significant contests.

Trump’s victory was made possible after he smashed through the so-called “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Ahead of the voting, surveys generally showed Harris and Trump tied or with a slight lead on the other, but always within the error margins.

With vote counting mostly done, unofficial tallies show Trump took Michigan by a one-and-a-half point margin, Pennsylvania by two points, and Wisconsin by less than one point — just as the polls predicted.

Nationally, polls leading up to the election showed a similar split, with either candidate up by a point or two, but never leading outside the margins. As the vote tally stands now, Trump is ahead by 3.5 points, landing right where the polling showed he might.

Why didn’t the election go the other way, if that’s what the polls suggested could happen?

That’s a good question, Scala said, and the losing party will likely spend the coming weeks looking for directions in which to aim their finger-pointing, but the polling and the results demonstrate a long-standing fact about presidential politics.

“I think the simple explanation may turn out to be the best one — the Democratic incumbent was quite unpopular and that unpopularity tends to rub off on the party,” he said. “Sometimes democracies act in a very binary way. There is the party in power, and the party out of power, and if you don’t like what the party in power did, you choose the party out of power.”

One way or the other though, Scala said, it’s quite clear who won this election, even if polling predicted a closer outcome.

“It’s over,” he said. “Democracies make decisions. That’s how it works. Do they always make wise decisions? Well, democracy’s record can be a rather checkered one,” he said.

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