Dr. Benjamin Toff
Associate Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center. He is co-author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism (with Ruth Palmer and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen) and for a decade, he has been working on a book project on how journalists cover public opinion.
X / Twitter: @BenjaminToff
U.S. Election 2024
25. Seeing past the herd: Polls and the 2024 election (Dr Benjamin Toff)
26. On polls and social media (Dr Dorian Hunter Davis)
27. How did gender matter in 2024? (Prof Regina Lawrence)
28. The keys to the White House: Why Allan Lichtman is wrong this time (Tom Fisher)
29. Beyond the rural vote: Economic anxiety and the 2024 presidential election (Dr Amanda Weinstein, Dr Adam Dewbury)
30. Black and independent voters: Which way forward? (Prof Omar Ali)
31. Latino voters in the 2024 election (Dr Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez)
32. Kamala’s key to the polls: The Asian American connection (Nadya Hayasi)
33. The vulnerability of naturalized immigrants and the hero who “will fix” America (Dr Alina E. Dolea)
34. Did Gen Z shape the election? No, because Gen Z doesn’t exist (Dr Michael Bossetta)
35. Cartographic perspectives of the 2024 U.S. election (Prof Benjamin Hennig)
In the three days following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance with Donald Trump in late June 2024, CNN and SSRS had a survey in the field testing how well his Vice President Kamala Harris would fare were she to serve as Democratic Party standard-bearer in his place. While the poll found Trump continuing to lead Biden by six points, Harris performed better, coming tantalizingly close “within striking distance,” the network wrote. She trailed in that survey 47 to 45 among registered voters—a nearly identical margin to the one she lost by some four and a half months later.
Unlike 2016 and 2020, the 2024 election will not be remembered as a year in which the polls failed. Some spectacular exceptions notwithstanding, including a late outlier result from respected Iowa pollster Ann Selzer whose 2020 statewide survey had foreshadowed the undercounting of Trump’s support that year, returns largely reflected what the numbers had been showing all along: a close election with Democrats facing strong nationwide headwinds. Polling averages showed exceptionally close races in all seven battleground states, and the final tally reflected that, tilting a bit more in Trump’s favor rather than less, but by normal predictable standards.
However dismayed Democrats may be about the outcome, however shocking it is that a majority of American voters could view his past actions as anything but disqualifying, one can’t really blame the pollsters for failing to forecast the final result this time around.
That didn’t stop analysts and academics from devoting an inordinate amount of time to second guessing and questioning the decision-making of pollsters in the run-up to the vote itself. And for good reason. The industry has been undergoing rapid changes over the last two decades. Survey research methods have been in a state of flux with many pollsters employing new weighting and modeling strategies. While some are defensible albeit debatable, such as relying heavily on respondent’s recall of past vote choice, others are more questionable or simply unknowable. With the proliferation of new firms in recent cycles—many partisan, others opportunistic—employing methods lacking in transparency if disclosed at all, many observers couldn’t help but wonder how many pollsters were putting a thumb on the scale in the way they tabulated their results to shape media narratives about their favored candidates or, self-servingly, in an effort to avoid embarrassment for getting it wrong on election day. As Nate Silver insisted on the eve of the election, “There’s more herding in swing state polls than at a sheep farm in the Scottish Highlands.”
But for all the fretting over implausible crosstabs, insidious nonresponse bias, and statistically improbable lack of variance in battleground predictions, what, yet again, did we gain from our collective obsession with the horse race?
Two decades have passed since the first polling aggregators began tracking the ups and downs of US presidential elections in state level surveys in order to game out how the Electoral College would be decided. Such efforts have become increasingly complex and arcane, feeding a certain kind of hobbyist demand just as sports analytics has done for baseball and football fans. But to what end? Whereas polling aggregators once served as a useful corrective to political journalists’ tendencies to cherry-pick unrepresentative point estimates in their coverage, that battle is long since won. The worry today is less about unsophisticated reporters making too much of a single result and more about their being unduly influenced by fly-by-night pollsters laundering suspect data through aggregator websites that employ virtually no gatekeeping standards. With an insatiable demand for ever more data to train increasingly anthropomorphic models, the aggregators are now an easier mark than the journalists.
But what we and so much of the rest of the world are left wondering the morning after is how to explain what it all means? What was this election about? Cutting through the thick haze of campaign messaging, it increasingly seems this election hinged not on concerns about freedom, authoritarianism, racism, xenophobia, or sexism—though all clearly mattered in some way to some—but instead on basic nickel-and-dime perceptions about the health of the economy, whose post-Covid improvements have not been universally felt nor recognized. Exit polls helped put those cold facts in sharp relief: 68 percent of voters felt the condition of the economy was “not so good” or “poor” and 7-in-10 of those voters opted to put Trump back in charge. What was true in June was still true in November.
For all the millions spent tracking the score in between, the marathon of rallies, the rambling speeches, the TikTok memes, celebrity endorsements, and even the failed assassination attempts, it is hard not to walk away from the 2024 election feeling anything but numb and nihilistic about democracy itself.