The Media Were More Wrong Than The Polls Were

The 2024 Election In A Nutshell

I’m back from my long-awaited vacation. Thank you to all my readers for hanging in there while I took some time away. As of next Sunday, I’ll return to my usual weekly newsletter, which was crowded out with all the election news over the last few weeks.

With the election results being finalized, it turned out that it wasn’t all that close. Trump won the popular vote in every swing state and came within a few points of winning Minnesota and New Hampshire. He also made New Mexico, Maine, and New Jersey competitive.

So why did the media and the polling institutions say this would be such a nail-biter? If you look at the Real Clear Politics polling average, it was very close to the final results, with only Wisconsin and Michigan being slightly more in favor of Harris than the final numbers would report. However, suppose you take Republican-leaning polls out of the equation as many media outlets and other polling institutions did. In that case, you get a totally different map that looks more like this:

Trump was set to lose the election, with the “blue wall staying blue” and states like Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, and Nevada being right on the cusp of flipping.

So here are four examples of how the media and polling narrative got it wrong and made people wait on pins and needles to see the election result.

While we’re still waiting on the gold standard of exit polling, the Pew Research and Catalyst exit polls, which I’ll write about when they're released, probably sometime in June or July, I’ll be drawing my information on exit polling from the Associated Press’ VoteCast.

AP VoteCast has the most extensive and most well-rounded exit polls currently released.

Here’s the media narrative, the polling information, and what happened.