What the polls have told us about the 2024 election

Polls have found plenty that’s meaningful about how voters think about politics in 2024, including the deep divide in values between supporters of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Election polls can’t foretell who will win the presidential election. They’re inherently imprecise. They carry the potential for error. All that being the case, polls this year have found plenty that’s meaningful about how voters think about politics in 2024 – from Americans’ broad-ranging pessimism about the political landscape to the deep divide in values between supporters of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. As a rule, polling provides a snapshot of opinions, rather than a prediction about how people may act in the future – whether that’s how they’ll eventually vote or any other decisions they might make. That’s especially true of this election, with surveys showing no clear leader in the presidential race, either nationally or in the septet of swing states likely to prove decisive to the outcome. And although most surveys suggest a tight race, a more decisive victory for either candidate remains well within the realm of possibility. “Shifts of a single point can be consequential to the outcome but are beyond the ability of most polls to capture with any precision,” Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University poll, wrote last week. But throughout the year, polling data has helped to capture the contours of the 2024 race, with several findings that fall well outside the margin of error. The election is playing out against a fundamentally bleak backdrop: The share of voters who say things in the US are going badly is higher than in any pre-election poll since 2008, and President Joe Biden’s approval rating has remained consistently and significantly underwater.  At the same time, to an unusual extent, the earliest days of the race were largely a referendum on Trump, rather than the incumbent. That dynamic shifted somewhat when Biden was replaced on the ticket by Harris, touching off an immediate surge in Democratic motivation. While the results of issue polls can sometimes vary based on framing, some results have been remarkably robust. Americans continue to be broadly opposed to the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs. Wade, with opposition consistently registering above 60% in CNN polling over the past two years. Other issues show deep political divides: In CNN polling this fall, Trump supporters were 46 percentage points likelier than Harris supporters to say that growing diversity poses a threat to American culture, which coincided with the Trump campaign’s increasing reliance on anti-migrant rhetoric.