For the third election in a row, political polls underestimate Trump’s support for Florida

GAINESVILLE – This year’s political polls in Florida accurately predicted that President-elect Donald Trump would win the White House, but by smaller margins than he actually did. For other races here, polls were less reliable, including some that incorrectly predicted passage of recreational marijuana and abortion rights amendments.

This year marked at least the third consecutive presidential election when polls underestimated the strength of Republican candidates, including Trump.

The post-mortem analysis of the elections ahead of this year’s elections reflects the challenges in calculating public opinion, experts said. They underestimated Republican turnout in Florida. Democratic voters remained more willing to participate in polls, potentially leading to distorted results. Polls conducted weeks or months before Election Day fail to capture the sentiments of late decision makers.

Opinion polls are influential. They can help politicians understand what the public wants and dictate strategies for political spending and messaging. Published results can also influence perceptions about which candidates or issues might win on Election Day, affecting turnout.

This election’s polls in Florida include some good, bad and ugly:

• Nearly all mainstream polls predicted Trump would easily win Florida over Vice President Kamala Harris, by an average of 8%. He actually won by just over 13%. The mid-October poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie, New York, which surveyed 1,510 Florida adults, found Trump ahead by just 4 percentage points, with a margin of error of 3.6%. It still showed Trump winning, but it vastly overestimated support for Harris among Democrats.

• The polls were much worse, predicting how tight the race would be for Republican Senator Rick Scott over Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. Florida Atlantic University’s polling lab showed in late October that Scott won 50% to 46% with a margin of error of 3.2%. The October Marist poll was even closer, predicting Scott would win 50% to 48%, with a margin of error of 3.6%. Scott actually won by almost 13 points.

• The FAU polling lab in late October showed Harris slightly ahead of Trump nationally. Trump actually won both the electoral vote by 312-226 and the popular vote by about 2.3 million votes. The polls also showed that the Florida recreational marijuana amendment barely received enough support to pass (it didn’t). The University of North Florida Opinion Lab also showed in late October that Florida’s abortion rights amendment had enough support to pass (it also failed).

Michael Binder, faculty director of the Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida, said this year’s polls slightly underestimated Republican turnout in Florida — a challenging problem in any election cycle. That has affected the outcome of some polls, he said.

“It looks bad if all the directionality is the same, but that’s something we’re struggling with,” he said.

Political polling in 2020 was particularly bad, with the highest errors in four decades for the national popular vote and the highest in at least two decades for state-level vote estimates in presidential, senatorial and governor races. Pundits blamed Republicans for their apparent reluctance to participate in polls, likely echoing Trump when he said polls were fake and designed to suppress votes.

The last time the country’s top polling scientists studied the issue in detail, they couldn’t find any obvious answers about why the polls were so bad: “Conclusive statements are impossible,” the American Association for Public Opinion Research wrote in its report in November 2022. The same group said it will review the 2024 political polls at the next national conference in May in St. Louis.

Kevin Wagner, co-executive director of FAU’s Political Communication and Public Opinion Research Lab, said polls show Democratic senators in several states, including Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, are overperforming. On Election Day, polls appeared to show the Congressional and Senate races looking more like the presidential race.

“The expectation is that there will be less ticket splitting. But I mean, there was still more than you would normally expect because you had Democratic Senate candidates winning in states that Donald Trump won,” Wagner said.

He said the poll’s inability to predict the margin of Scott’s victory in Florida was particularly concerning.

“That’s one that we need to study a little more to understand why Senator Scott’s numbers weren’t more representative of where he ended up,” he said. “Some of that may have been late decision makers, some of that may have just been the nature of how these monsters broke down.”

The polling experts said Florida polls may have missed the mark on the state’s controversial amendments to legalize recreational marijuana and enshrine abortion rights, as organized opposition to those measures — led in both cases by popular Gov. Ron DeSantis – only came closer. to election day. The DeSantis administration used state resources to fight both efforts.

“We did pretty well,” Binder said. “If we had waited two weeks and voted a few days before the election, I think we would have done much better with Amendments Three and Four,” he said.

This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: 2024 political election polls underestimate Trump’s support for Florida