Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

In 2016, most pollsters — nationally and in swing states — had Hillary Clinton with a small lead on Election Day. After Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, many Americans felt misled by those polls and the coverage of them. So, four years later, can we really trust the polls? Here, FiveThirtyEight database journalist Dhrumil Mehta explains what went wrong in 2016 (and what didn’t) and encourages you not to give up on polling in 2020.

Overall, women are more likely than men to vote, so it’s a coveted group — but hardly a monolithic bloc. That said, more and more women are supporting Democrats for president, while more and more men are supporting Republicans, resulting in a big gender gap. The size of that gap has varied since it emerged in 1980, but we saw the largest gap yet in 2016. According to the Pew Research Center, the gender gap four years ago was a substantial 13 percentage points — Trump won support from 52 percent of men and just 39 percent of women. That gap was even bigger among white voters: Trump won a hefty 62 percent of white men compared with 47 percent of white women, for a 15-point gender gap.

Depending on the poll you look at, Trump is doing worse among both men and women now compared with 2016, but he has lost more support among women than men, including working-class white women. All told, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see a large gender gap in 2020. And we might see the largest one yet.

Yes, Geoffrey, the theory of “shy” Trump voters first emerged even before Trump won the 2016 election. The idea was that some voters who intended to vote for Trump would decline to share that information with pollsters because of social-desirability bias — supporting Trump could be viewed negatively by the person conducting the survey. Trump’s victory, alongside a larger-than-average polling error in the Upper Midwest, only bolstered the idea that voters weren’t revealing their true intentions to pollsters.

Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, we’ve received A LOT of questions about “shy” Trump voters, most recently because of a Politico article in which two pollsters suggested these voters could play a role in 2020. The reality is that there isn’t good evidence “shy” Trump voters exist — or that they exist in any larger proportion than, say, “shy” Biden voters. We ran through many of the reasons for that in this recent episode of Model Talk on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. If you’re looking for something to do while you wait for the vote to start coming in, give it a listen.