'Improbably tight race': Here’s why polling experts are doubting the 'razor-close narrative'

02 November 2024

For multiple weeks, almost every major pollster has had Vice President Kamala Harris neck-and-neck with former President Donald Trump in polls of both battleground states and the nation at large. But some experts aren't so sure the election will be as close as expected.

The Guardian reported that in the final round of polling done just before Tuesday's election, the race remains within the margin of error in all seven swing states most likely to decide which candidate wins a majority of electoral votes. According to FiveThirtyEight's aggregated polling data, both Harris and Trump are within one or two points of each other in states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But two polling experts are theorizing that this is less reflective of the actual race than it is of pollsters being overly cautious to not be dead-wrong when official results are tallied.

Vanderbilt University politics professor Josh Clinton and NBC director of elections John Lapinski said the spate of polls showing a dead heat could be due to pollsters weighting different categories in a certain way to ensure a poll delivers a narrow margin.

"[Polls show] not just an astonishingly tight race, but also an improbably tight race," Clinton and Lapinski wrote for NBC. "Some of the tools pollsters are using in 2024 to address the polling problems of 2020, such as weighting by partisanship, past vote or other factors, may be flattening out the differences and reducing the variation in reported poll results."

In a typical election, there would be some polls that show one candidate or another having a margin of victory of 5% or more, though that hasn't been the case in the final months of the 2024 election. In fact, 124 of the last 321 polls conducted in the seven major battleground states have had margins within one percentage point. Both experts added that if pollsters are artificially structuring results to produce a tie, it "raises the possibility that the results of the election could be unexpectedly different than the razor-close narrative the cluster of state polls and the polling averages suggest."

The New York Times recently reported that because pollsters underestimated Trump in both 2016 and 2020, many viewed those results as "traumatic" and are hesitant to publish any poll that shows Harris in a strong lead.

"For some, another underestimate of Mr. Trump could be a major threat to their business and their livelihood. For the rest, their status and reputations are on the line. If they underestimate Mr. Trump a third straight time, how can their polls be trusted again?" The Times' Nate Cohn wrote on Friday. "It is much safer, whether in terms of literal self-interest or purely psychologically, to find a close race than to gamble on a clear Harris victory."

Cohn went on to explain that "pollsters are willing to take steps to produce more Republican-leaning results" out of self-interest. He even admitted himself that he would be hesitant to trust the veracity of a poll that showed the vice president leading Trump by a significant margin given "polling misfires" in the past two elections.

"The 2016 and 2020 polling misfires shattered many pollsters’ confidence in their own methods and data," Cohn wrote. "When their results come in very blue, they don’t believe it. And frankly, I share that same feeling: If our final Pennsylvania poll comes in at Harris +7, why would I believe it?"

Click here to read the Guardian's report in full.

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