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By Theo Burman
Live News Reporter
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The run-up to the 2024 election saw numerous predictions and forecasts, and inevitably, not everyone was correct about who the next president would be.
Prominent forecast models had drastic fluctuations during the election cycle because of unexpected events, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out of the race and President Joe Biden being replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris.
President-elect Donald Trump claimed victory on Tuesday after winning the swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and he could pick up more, as Michigan, Nevada and Arizona have not finished counting their votes.
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Below, we analyze several of the forecasts made in the lead-up to Tuesday's election. Newsweek has contacted the pollsters listed for comment.
Nate Silver
As one of the most recognizable names in polling, Nate Silver's prediction carried a significant amount of weight throughout the election. His model, the Silver Bulletin*,* predicted on Tuesday that Harris had a 50 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, compared to Trump's 49.6 percent after weeks of showing Trump with the edge.
In the final days of the election, Silver said that the race was a "pure toss-up" and that "50-50 is the only responsible forecast." However, a couple of days before Election Day, he also said his gut told him that Trump would win.
Silver also said there would be a high chance of a "clean sweep" on election night, with one of the candidates winning every swing state.
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Allan Lichtman
"Polling Nostradamus" Allan Lichtman is the creator of the "Thirteen Keys to the White House," a series of historical fundamentals that can be either true or false, and which dictate whether the incumbent party retains control of the presidency.
Unlike other forecast models, Lichtman's keys provide an absolute answer rather than a percentage. In September, Lichtman said his model predicted that Harris would win the election.
Lichtman said the keys in the Democrat's favor included the lack of a strong third-party candidate and that the economy was performing well.
Ann Selzer
Another big name in the polling industry, Ann Selzer released a shock poll the weekend before Election Day that showed Harris up by 3 points in Iowa, despite previous polling showing Trump with a healthy lead there and the state backing the Republican in the previous two elections.
The poll, conducted by Selzer & Co. for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom, found that 47 percent of Iowa voters supported Harris and 44 percent supported Trump.
Despite its historical reputation of being accurate, Selzer's poll did not reflect the final result in Iowa. Trump took the state with a comfortable 14-point lead, increasing his margin there from 2020, when he won the state by 9 points.
FiveThirtyEight
Nate Silver's former election forecast model, FiveThirtyEight, is the most well-known polling aggregation site in U.S. politics, and it correctly predicted Biden's win in 2020.
On the eve of the 2024 election, the model, owned by ABC News, gave Harris a 50 percent chance of winning the election, while Trump had a 49 percent chance of winning.
Toward the end of last month, Trump reached his highest chances in the model, peaking at a 55 percent chance of victory on October 26.
The Economist
The Economist's election forecast, which uses similar techniques to FiveThirtyEight, also showed a close race on the final day of the election cycle, giving Harris a 56 percent chance of winning, while Trump had a 43 percent chance. There was a 1 percent chance of a draw.
Which Pollsters Were Most Accurate?
Polls from Atlas Intel on the final week of the campaign showed Trump winning Pennsylvania by 1 point—which, at the time of writing, is in line with what the former president is set to win by, according to the Associated Press. Atlas also correctly estimated Trump's margins in Ohio and North Carolina.
The British polling firm J.L. Partners was also accurate with its numbers in the lead-up to the election. On November 5, its model gave Trump a 54 percent chance of victory—greater than both The Economist's and FiveThirtyEight's predictions.
Polling published at the end of October in conjunction with the Daily Mail showed Trump having a 3-point lead over Harris, and it was one of the only pollsters predicting that the Republican could win the popular vote for the first time.
James Johnson, the founder of J.L. Partners, told Newsweek that the firm's accuracy was due to its approach to nonvoters and its use of long-form focus groups.
"The key thing is people made the same mistakes they did in 2016; they understated the Trump voter who is less likely to be engaged politically, and crucially, more likely to be busy, not spending 20 minutes talking to pollsters—people working a pretty common job or, as the case of many Hispanic voters, juggling two or three jobs at a time."
Johnson said too many pollsters relied on "single-mode approaches" to gather respondents and that mixed-method approaches involving in-app notifications were better at reaching people "going about their daily life." This technique was especially effective in reaching young nonwhite men, a demographic that was key to Harris' loss on Election Day.
Focus groups for these voters, which often took about 90 minutes, gave researchers enough time to unpick intentions that quantitative polling methods would miss. Johnson said that what the firm found among nonwhite men particularly "is that in the first 10 minutes or so, they either say they were undecided or voting Harris."
He continued: "If you were doing it for 10 minutes, you wouldn't get under the surface, but if you spent 90 minutes with them, they start to open up about their worldview, and by the end of the conversation they were actually admitting they would vote Trump.
"That unlocks a really important group, and that allowed us to make calls and decisions. Remember, polling is a science, but there is also an element of judgment in it, and you need to know how to make those weightings."
Do you have a story we should be covering? Do you have any questions about the election results? Contact LiveNews@newsweek.com.
Update 11/6/24, 11:12 a.m. ET: This article was updated with a comment from James Johnson.
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