Polls for the 2024 presidential election show an agonizingly close race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a race that could swing either way, with little to separate the two candidates across the seven battleground states that are likely to decide the outcome.

But since 2016, when Republican nominee Trump delivered a surprise victory over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, an outcome not commonly or clearly predicted in national polls, the polling industry has come under scrutiny for its accuracy.

Similar issues in subsequent years, such as the overestimation of support for President Joe Biden relative to Trump in the 2020 election campaign and the underestimation of the size of the Democratic vote in some key 2022 midterm races, have kept the issue alive.

But polling firms have put a lot of work into revising and refining their models, trying to recalibrate their assumptions to better capture representative samples of American voters, and then restore their statues as barometers of the nation’s thoughts and feelings.

And that’s a key point: Polls are supposed to take the temperature at a given point in time, a snapshot in time rather than a locked-in prediction of what’s to come at a later point in time. Events happen, minds change, and therefore results differ from what polls suggested.

Nov. 1 538 — which takes a weighted average of polls and models the results to provide a probability-based forecast of who will prevail — says its simulations show Trump winning 53 times out of 100 to Harris’ 47. Bottom line reason it is neck and neck.

Yet perhaps it is all illusory. There is a chance the victor will emerge with a much stronger than expected performance, a scenario some observers say is likely. And that would be a result that only a few of the country’s pollsters have demonstrated.

With this in mind, Newsweek pose the question to pollsters across the US: Are we headed for another poll in the 2024 election? And where are the polls most prone to miscalculating support for both candidates? Here’s what they said.

Charles Franklin, Director, Marquette Law School Poll

We’ll find out next week if the polls were generally right or not this year. It is clear that the polls and poll averages point to a very close race in swing states and the national referendum. That contrasts with polls in 2016 and 2020 that showed larger Democratic margins. So at least this year, the polls say we really don’t know who’s going to win because it’s so close. We shouldn’t be surprised if Harris wins, and we shouldn’t be surprised if Trump wins. Both seem to win equally.

Mike Traugott, Research Professor Emeritus, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

Support for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is largely baked in, with very few people left to persuade. So the outcome will depend on turnout and each side’s ability to get its supporters to the polls or a ballot in their hands.

This means that the accuracy of the polls will depend on their turnout models – how they estimate likely voters.

Furthermore, I would expect to see a very large gender gap in support for the two candidates, perhaps enough to sway the result for Harris. Looking at the national polls, for example, although most show the race to be very close, their internal gender gaps show varying sizes.

This is troubling in several ways – women are a majority of the electorate and vote higher than men – so this may explain any discrepancies between the final poll estimates (this coming Sunday and Monday) and the actual voting results.

John Zogby, Senior Partner, John Zogby Strategies

I feel strongly that the polls for battleground states were solid in 2016. They captured the downward trajectory of Clinton’s support, enough to show that it could be losing.

If we only look at the poll the day before and treat it as a “prediction”, then pundits will fail, not pollsters. I think the polls show it’s a tie right now.

We should be able to catch if the curse breaks one way or the other before the weekend. Treat the polls as a series of snapshots, not as predictors.

Josh Clinton, co-director of the Vanderbilt Poll

Who knows. Just as likely, I think the polls will improve because it could be a repeat of 2020, and pollsters have reacted to the 2020 poll miss to change how they adjust their results (which is why we’re seeing so many ties in the polls); that the polls will underestimate Trump even with the adjustments if new voters break for Trump and don’t take polls (as they did in 2020), or perhaps there is an understatement of Harris support because the polls adjust to remove a Democrat/Harris lead in the raw data because they believe a Harris lead is an issue of who is responding rather than what the electorate will be.

Christopher Wlezien, Hogg Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin

If we’re headed for another poll miss, it’s important to remember that polls are often wrong, for the president’s two-party share nationally by 2-3 points on average at the end of the campaign.

The numbers are higher as we step back from the election, not surprisingly. This is important to bear in mind when evaluating polls, especially where margins are small and performance is judged based on getting the winner right ie. polls can come close to the final vote share and still point to the wrong winner.

And then there is the electoral college, which directs the focus to state polls, where the errors have tended to be larger than what we see nationally.

Now if you’re wondering if we’ll see errors above the average this time, of course it’s possible, although my suspicion is that the polls will do better than in 2020 as they have an incentive to and have made various changes to it. end.

How much better, I don’t know, as it is hard to say what exactly they are doing and to what effect, bearing in mind that it is not easy to know who will cast votes, even with significant early voting, and get them to respond to surveys.

We don’t know that the decisions pollsters make when making their estimates (can) have a big impact on the reported poll results.

Are they better at representing Trump voters who were apparently missed in 2020? Have they, as some analysts have suggested, overcorrected? What about new voters? All this remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, given history, don’t be surprised if a candidate underperforms or overperforms in the polls by some degree.

Courtney Kennedy, Vice President of Methods and Innovation, Pew Research Center

There are reasons for optimism about the accuracy of polling this year, and there are also reasons for pessimism.

If a vote is missing, it won’t be for lack of effort. My colleagues and I did a survey that found that most national polls (61 percent) have changed their methods since 2016. That is, they changed either how they sample people, how they interview them, or both.

Compared to 2016, polls today are more likely to give people more ways to participate (eg online or by phone). This can help reach a more representative group of a people because no single approach works for everyone.

The 2022 midterms also saw generally accurate polls, despite a surge of partisan polls predicting a broad Republican victory. FiveThirtyEight found that “polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.”

But there are also reasons to be very cautious about pre-election choices this year. It is undeniable that both times Trump ran for president, most polls underestimated his support.

The root cause seems to be that Trump supporters are less likely to take polls than people who are otherwise similar to them (eg people of the same age, education, race, etc.). This pattern is not easily fixed by pollsters.

There are some things that pollsters can do that we know help (eg allow people to take the poll offline, make sure the weighting protocol has an adjustment to get the proportion of Republicans versus Democrats correct).

But these tactics may not be entirely effective. We won’t know until the votes are counted if the changes the polls made were fully effective.

In recent cycles, the risk of a missed election has been particularly high in states like Wisconsin. One reason is that some pollsters sample from state voter files. In Wisconsin, data that gets attached to the voter file — data that tells pollsters which voters are Republican and which voters are Democrat — has a lot of errors.

A recent study found that “less than half of (registered voters) attributed to having some partisanship in Wisconsin self-identify with the imputed partisanship, and only a third of those believed to be Republicans in the voter register, identified themselves as Republicans when interviewed.

In fact, nearly 50 percent of those believed to be Republicans in the voter file report voting for President Biden — far higher than support among likely Republicans in other states. Somewhat similar patterns occur in Minnesota and Michigan.”

In terms of demographics, it is especially difficult for the polls to get an accurate reading of young adults. One reason is simple—sample sizes with young adults tend to be small (eg, 100 to 200 interviews), which means estimates will be quite noisy.

Furthermore, younger adults are more likely to relocate and change their phone number, making it difficult to have current contact information for them.