2020 US Political Polls Were Least Accurate in Decades, Analysis Finds

WASHINGTON - Nearly nine months after last year’s U.S. presidential election, there’s one more loser – political polls – with a new analysis showing the 2020 surveys in advance of the November 3 vote were among the least accurate in decades.

The polling industry’s professional organization, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, says that it reviewed 2,858 polls, including hundreds of national and state-level polls, and found that they consistently understated the support for then-President Donald Trump, although he lost the election to Democrat Joe Biden, now the country’s 46th president. The group found that the surveys overstated the margin between Biden and Trump by 3.9 percentage points in the national popular vote and 4.3 percentage points in state polls. The polling organization said the percentage error rate was of an “unusual magnitude,” the highest in 40 years for national popular vote surveys and at least 20 years for state-level polls.