Was 2020 election polling in NC more accurate than 2016? Here’s how they compare
Pollsters favored Hillary Clinton winning North Carolina in the 2016 presidential race, and very few seemed to see Donald Trump coming.
Four years later, the preliminary election results show they may have missed the mark again — this time by a thinner margin.
National polls that predicted Clinton would win handily were slammed coming out of the 2016 election. In the weeks that followed, pollsters and political scientists realized a few key errors were made — including failing to account for the level of education held by the voters being questioned, which skewed disproportionately in favor of Clinton, CBS News and The New York Times reported at the time.
The question of whether those same polls could be trusted has loomed large over the 2020 election, particularly in the battleground state of North Carolina.
“The structural challenges we had in 2016 are still with us,” Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at Pew Research Center, told Axios in August of the way some polls were conducted this year.
2016 NC polls vs. reality
The polls calling the presidential race for North Carolina released closest to Election Day in 2016 “were all over the map,” The News & Observer reported
The New York Times predicted it would be a tie between Trump and Clinton, while CBS News and Quinnipiac polls had Clinton up by 3%, according to the N&O. In Raleigh, the TV station WRAL saw Trump ahead by 7%.
FiveThirtyEight’s presidential election forecast, meanwhile, predicted Clinton had a 55.5% chance of winning North Carolina’s 15 electoral college votes.
But the final tally was somewhere in between.
According to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, Clinton took 46.17% of the vote compared to Trump’s 49.83% — a difference of roughly 3.6%.
2020 NC polls vs. reality
The pollsters in North Carolina predicted a tighter race in 2020.
On Oct. 22, FiveThirtyEight projected Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden would get 49.3% of the vote compared to Trump’s 46.2% for a 3.1% lead, McClatchy News reported. RealClearPolitics had Biden with a 2.3% lead, taking 48.8% to Trump’s 46.5%.
A week later on Oct. 29, FiveThirtyEight still had Biden up — this time by 2.3 percentage points, according to McClatchy News. RealClearPolitics had Biden with a .7% lead over Trump.
But the margin of victory for Biden all but disappeared as Election Day neared.
On Nov. 2, FiveThirtyEight had Biden leading Trump by 1.9 percentage points, according to McClatchy News. RealClearPolitics, meanwhile, had Trump up by 0.6 percentage points.
“Monday is the first day since early September the RealClearPolitics average shows the president leading Biden in North Carolina,” McClatchy News reported. “The former vice president has been steadily leading Trump by narrow margins throughout the election season in the FiveThirtyEight average.”
The presidential race hadn’t been called in North Carolina on Wednesday morning, largely due to mail-in ballots still being counted.
But Trump was leading Biden as of 11:20 a.m. with almost 75% of ballots cast, according to the state board of elections. Trump had 49.98% of the vote compared to Biden’s 48.57% — a difference of 1.41 percentage points.
