
Nate Silver Says Polling Seems Unreliable Because Our Politics Are Very Messy
A post-election ritual in America involves roasting pollsters. The 2024 election barbecue is underway. The heat may have an explanation.
Politicians, voters and members of the media lament polling that didn’t definitively predict the winner and winning margin. Donald Trump added a unique grievance by threatening to sue the pollster for the Des Moines Register who predicted Kamala Harris would carry Iowa.
Nate Silver, who applied his skills as a baseball statistician to become a top research guru, says complaints aside, polling in 2024 revealed a close election that could have gone either way. Silver noted final polling averages were accurate in 48 of the 50 states, despite uncertainty throughout the race of who was ahead at any given moment.
Trump’s victory in all seven swing states wasn’t necessarily a surprise, Silver said. According to his pre-election forecast, there was a 20 percent likelihood of Trump winning every swing state. There was a 14 percent chance of Harris winning every swing state. The odds favored Trump.
Polling earned another black eye, Silver said, because the electorate is deeply and almost evenly divided, which polling reflects. “In a world where the political parties are remarkably efficient at corralling voters and competing to a 50-50 split each time, polls aren’t going to provide the certainty we crave,” Silver says.
“We’d better get used to it,” he adds. “This is the fourth election in a row in which the popular vote margin was within five points, something that has happened only once before in the country’s history, for six elections between 1876 through 1896.”
Casting aspersions at pollsters is misplaced. “The problems with polls are the same problems that plague politics,” Silver asserts. “Polling has become a mirror that reflects the frustrating, even infuriating nature of politics in America in 2024. Our politics are messy, and that is not something polls can fix. We’d better get used to that, too.”
Other Post-Election Reflections
In contrast with 2020, both Republicans and Democrats believed the 2024 election was conducted fairly, based on polling by Pew Research. More than 90 percent of Trump voters expressed confidence in the 2024 election, far higher than their 21 percent confidence rating in 2020.
Eighty-four percent of 2024 Democratic voters expressed confidence in the election, down from 94 percent in 2020 and 96 percent in 2022.
The 2024 election showed more partisan splits in voting for President and U.S. senators. Four swing states carried by Trump – Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin – re-elected their sitting Democratic senators.
The four “mismatched“ election results accounted for 12 percent of the 34 senatorial races during the presidential election. That’s the highest percentage since the 2017-2018 election cycle when seven of 35 Senate races ran counter to presidential voting.

Photo Credit: Sheraz Sadiq / OPB
The pattern of House districts being perennially blue or red continued in the 2024 election. Just 16 congressional districts in the nation voted for one party for president and a House member from the other party. One of the 16 was Democratic Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, who won re-election in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District despite Trump receiving 50 percent of the vote.
Newly elected Democratic Congresswoman Janelle Bynum captured Oregon’s 5th Congressional District by unseating Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer in a Democratically-learning district that she flipped in the 2022 election.
After the 2024 election, only 13 House seats, including Gluesenkamp-Perez, are held by Democrats in districts carried by Trump. Three Republicans won in districts carried by Kamala Harris. As recently as the 2000 election, there were 46 Democratic Congressmen in districts won by a GOP presidential candidate and 40 Republicans in districts won by the Democratic presidential candidate.
Democratic Congressman Jared Golden won re-election in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District despite Trump carrying his district by almost 10 percentage points. Golden and Gluesenkamp-Perez are two of the leaders of the Blue Dog Coalition whose members sometimes vote with Republicans on House floor votes.
Factoids About Republicans
Pew Research compiled 10 facts about Republican voters in this election year. A few highlights include:
- 79% of Republican voters identify as non-Hispanic Whites, down from 93% two decades ago.
- 35% of GOP voters have at least a four-year college degree, compared with 27% in 1996.
- The 51% of Whites without college degrees make up the largest bloc of GOP voters.
- 65% are 50 years or older, compared with 59% of overall voters.
- 8% are 30 years or younger.
- Eight in 10 Republicans are associated with a Christian denomination, compared to 67% of overall voters.
- Six in 10 believe abortion should be illegal.
- 53% hold a very unfavorable opinion of Democrats, up from 21% a decade ago.
Factoids About Democrats
Pew Research also compiled 10 facts about Democrats. Highlights include:
- 44% of Democratic voters are Hispanic, Black, Asian, another race or multiracial. This is roughly double the share of 23% in 1996.
- 45% have at least a bachelor’s degree, up from 22% in 1996.
- White Americans without a four-year degree made up a majority of Democratic voters in the 1990s. Today, they account for just 26%.
- 46% identify as something other than Christian. The share of Democratic voters who are religiously unaffiliated has roughly doubled since 2008, from 18% to 38%.
- 68% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say gun violence is a very big problem in the country today. The affordability of health care, the ability of parties to work together and climate change also ranked among the most serious national problems for Democrats.
- 63% believe abortion should be legal, up 4 points since 2021.
- Only 24% hold a favorable opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court.
- 92% of Democrats expressed an unfavorable opinion of Trump.