It is important to recall previous experiences with public opinion polls that were unsuccessful in their predictions and outcomes, and the history of opinion poll failures in U.S. elections dates back a long time, with the 1948 elections being one of the most famous examples of opinion poll failure, as most polls predicted an easy victory for Republican candidate Thomas Dewey over Democrat Harry Truman, but President Truman achieved a victory over his opponent.
In the 1960 elections, opinion polls predicted a win for Richard Nixon, but John Kennedy succeeded in winning, and the same thing happened in the 1980 elections, where polls indicated a close race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, but Reagan won by a large margin!
In 2016, most polling organizations predicted a significant victory for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, which did not happen, and in 2020, most opinion polls predicted a win for Joe Biden, which did occur, but they also exaggerated the support for the Democratic candidate compared to then-President Donald Trump.
These errors left many Americans disappointed with the entire polling industry, and recent years have seen a decline in the credibility of public opinion polls, the most recent being the U.S. elections held in 2024, where Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump competed, and questions about the accuracy of opinion polls increased, especially after the repeated failures of opinion poll predictions in previous years. Despite methodological challenges, opinion polls remain an important tool for estimating the closeness of the electoral race, but the question remains: will they be reliable? And can we rely on them to predict the winner?
The results of opinion polls were very close in the competition between Trump and Harris, leaving the audience of the candidates in great confusion, as one opinion poll showed a close competition between the contenders at the national level.
Despite this, Trump had an advantage nationally by a margin of seven points over Harris, and the result was a landslide victory for Trump, where he obtained the electoral college votes, and excelled in the popular vote and in the swing states!
There are many dilemmas that the process of public opinion polls suffers from, related to some thorny dimensions that are subject to criticism or questions about the credibility of the poll results, and the most important of these are: Do the implementers ask the right questions? Do they modify the wording of the questions to get the answers they want? Who were interviewed? Who funds the polls: political parties, media outlets, or lobby groups (interests)?
Most people from all categories, whether they are elites, intellectuals, media, or even ordinary citizens, cite the results of opinion polls when they agree with their trends, while they strongly doubt them when they contradict their trends or show them as a minority.
On the other hand, opinion polls are a fundamental mechanism for knowing the impact of electoral campaigns and how the public interacts with them, so politicians rely on them to formulate their messages and direct their campaigns, and therefore opinion polls are not only an objective mechanism for recognizing voter trends, but they also contribute in one way or another to influencing voter behavior and their expectations regarding election results.
Polls were conducted face-to-face at homes by interviewers, and with the spread of landlines in American homes, interviews shifted to this method of data collection, and then with the spread of mobile phones, they became the prevailing method.
With increasing financial pressures on polling companies and their media partners, there has been a shift to online interviews using both internet sites and mobile phone applications, and this has raised important methodological questions about the extent to which survey data represent the community, and the decline in response rates, and most companies currently rely on combining more than one method of collecting survey data in an attempt to reach representative samples.
Despite some failures, polls will remain the most effective way to obtain the opinions of voters, and other data sources such as social media may provide some understanding of voter behavior, but they are not of the same quality in predicting voting intentions or election results, because they rely heavily on inference.
Therefore, despite the low public support for President Trump reaching about 35%, compared to a dissatisfaction rate exceeding 60%, according to the latest readings of the CNN network! it is not ruled out that the Republicans will win the midterm congressional elections or that the result will be close.
