Another way this election was weird: Polls that were actually right

Votes are still being counted, and too early to do a full analysis, but the polls predicted a virtual tie election, and they were basically right.

I’m interested to know *how* the polls got it right, though;

—Did polls “get it right” in a traditional sense, by accurately gauging both sides’ support?

—Or: did polls “get it right” by pure luck? In other words: Did they continue to make the same mistakes of underestimating the depth of MAGA voters, but also equally failed to account for an unknown bloc of Democratic voters — for instance, first-time young women voters energized to register due to Roe v. Wade’s reversal?

The answer will impact greatly upon polling’s continued viability as a profession, when it looked to be on death’s door after badly misjudging the ‘16 and ‘20 elections.

See: Chart, which visualizes how polls overestimated Joe Biden’s support in key battleground states in 2020 vs. the margins he actually received in the election (shown in the drop on the right-hand side).

The answer will also have big implications for the strategies of both parties going forward, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about this.

The unreliability of polling was also an ambient factor eating away at trust in our elections (creating space for certain bad-faith actors — *ahem,* Trump — to claim whatever they wanted about election results), so I’m hopeful polls are getting better. As a Democrat, but also as a political nerd, I’m actually even more excited about the possibility of polls becoming trustworthy again than I am about the Democrats’ performance.