Each campaign season, pollsters conduct hundreds of pre-election surveys, feeding the apparently endless public and news media appetite for agonizing over the poll results. When the polls don’t accurately forecast the final election results, many are disillusioned or even angry. That was especially true in 2016, when most national polls projected that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency.

So how did pollsters do in 2020?

After the 2016 election, we worked with political scientist Aaron Weinschenk to release analyses, revealing 2016’s final, national pre-election polls were actually more accurate than they had been in 2012. They pretty closely forecast the popular vote, even if Donald Trump snagged victory in the electoral college. We found a slight pro-Democratic bias that was mostly not statistically significant.

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