While Vice President Kamala Harris voters might still feel shell-shocked over the election results, even though polls were consistently tight, there is one group of academics who were likely expecting Donald Trump’s win: American political scientists.
Key polls on the presidential race, from FiveThirtyEight to the Cook Political Report, gave Harris a slight edge over Trump in November.
But PollyVote, an election prediction research group made up of political science professors and forecasting experts, contends “poll-based methods” tended to be more optimistic about Harris’s chances than other methods.
PollyVote accurately predicted Trump’s win, including in the popular vote, one month before the election. Its modeling used basic factors, such as people’s perceptions of the economy, whether the country is on the right track and if the incumbent administration is headed in the right direction.
“Election results are relatively predictable by, is the economy getting better? If it is, people reward the incumbent party. If it’s not, people punish the incumbent party,” said UC San Diego political scientist Thad Kousser.
But he also praised polls just before the election that showed Harris and Trump mostly even, with the former with a one point lead.
“Trump won by 1.5% points,” Kousser said. “That’s really good. If I were a weatherman, and I told you it’s gonna be 70 tomorrow and it was 71.5 you’d say I’m a pretty good weatherman.”
Still, despite accurately predicting the tightness of the presidential race, popular polls have repeatedly underestimated Trump’s support among voters.
“The fact that we’ve seen surveys slightly largely under-predicting Republican performance in really the last three presidential elections, I think, indicates that Republicans may be less likely to pick up that phone, less likely to be as forthcoming about their views,” Kousser said.
Kousser says pollsters have to figure out how to reach Democrats and Republican voters in equal numbers, and predict which party will actually cast ballots on Election Day.
