Politics: 2020 Polling Results

 

A lot has already been said about the polling from the 2020 elections. The common theme is that the polling was wrong. But was it? Polling said that Biden would win the election, which he did. He won with a huge gap in the popular vote between him and Trump. While I won’t mention every single poll, I’ll split this into three main categories: the gubernatorial elections, the senate elections, and the presidential election. I will ignore every other one. Polling comes from a lot of sources and not just one, but may only include October and early November polls.

 

The Gubernatorial polls were all right. All of the governors running for reelection won their races regardless of which party they were. That’s exactly what the polls said would happen. And the races without incumbents in them went the ways the polls suggested.

 

In the polls on the senate races, there were a lot of consistent toss-ups with at least one source saying that one side only would win with most of them and only one having the polls disagree. The polls about Maine and North Carolina were wrong. The rest were right with Georgia’s special election toss-ups by some consistently and the regular one split both ways (unless I got both of them switched by mistake). North Carolina was probably wrong due to a scandal that was revealed about the Democratic candidate late in the election cycle.

 

Now regarding the presidential poll, one can’t just do the election as a whole as you have to go state by state. The information that I was looking for seemed to change where it was at. But the gist of it is that Florida and North Carolina were both wrong while everything else was right.

 

Perhaps the biggest issue to keep track of are the sites of 578 and 270 to win. They seemed to be the ones that are most predicting a blue wave that never happened as the Democrats lost seats in the House (although not enough to lost their majority). 270 to win mentioned some of the polls that made things look better for Biden then they turned out to be (the end result still being good in the end for Biden). 578 might have been the one that most talked about the House races that weren’t even mentioned in this blog post.

 

In conclusion, I don’t believe that the polls were as wrong as people thought as most of them said exactly what was going to happen. It may have gone too far into how strong some of the candidates’ support was, but it was much better than some would have you believe.