Will Polls Keep Overestimating Trump’s Support?

Politico: “It’s true that surveys overestimated Trump’s actual vote share in eight of the 10 states where there was enough polling for FiveThirtyEight to produce an average. And after a spate of national polls showed Biden behind Trump, the president’s campaign asserted that polling “consistently overestimates Donald Trump while underestimating President Biden.” Aides cited the results of the presidential primaries and special elections held since 2022 as proof.”

“But both are misleading indicators. That’s because the reason polling overestimated Republican margins in the primaries and special elections is unlikely to be duplicated in the general election: It was hard for pollsters to know which voters were going to show up.”

“Using polling to estimate election results requires making informed choices about the composition of the electorate. But the Republican primary electorate is much smaller and harder to predict than the much broader segment of voters likely to turn out in November for the general election.”