Daily Mail tops league table for 2024 election polling accuracy

No pollster was more accurate in predicting Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris than Daily Mail along with JL Partners.

In another bad night for the public polling industry (with special mention to Ann Selzer, whose poll on election night in Iowa was off by as much as 17 points), the Daily Mail’s numbers stood out as the best in the country.

President-elect Donald Trump is now expected to win the popular vote – we were one of the few pollsters to make that call.

JL Partners/Daily Mail projected a 50-47 popular vote, gaining Trump’s share and missing his margin of victory by just 0.5%, based on preliminary estimates of the national vote share.

The results showed that we were ahead of a table of twenty different major pollsters, all of which were less accurate. Eight of them predicted Trump would lose the popular vote.

No pollster was more accurate in predicting Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris than Daily Mail along with JL Partners

“Our technique used mixed method polling and innovative weighting techniques, and relied on in-depth interviews with voters to uncover the reality of the outcome,” said James Johnson of JL Partners.

‘Where others held back or were distracted, we at the Mail stuck to our guns and got to work.’

Our polling methodology focused on reaching potential voters who were routinely overlooked in 2016 and 2020. These are low-involvement voters who may not have voted in recent elections and are unlikely to participate in polls.

These methods reached the voters who made a difference for Trump: men – white, black, Hispanic, Asian, non-college educated and blue-collar.

We also conducted in-depth, 90-minute, in-person conversations with individual voters in places like Georgia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

These interviews gave us insights into voting behavior that others ignored.

An overreliance on outdated techniques, such as online-only surveys and telephone polls, has resulted in an oversample of Democratic-leaning people, such as young professionals and older, white, liberal women.

Our last national poll included a high percentage of respondents who had not voted before (almost two out of ten people in the sample were from this group).

A large number of polls incorrectly predicted that Kamala Harris would win the popular vote

Once again, the American media landscape is littered with the fragmented reports of the pollsters who got it wrong. We’re proud to say that JL Partners/DailyMail.com wasn’t there.

These are why we saw the shifts that no one else saw. We discovered the undercurrents that others did not discover. We made model decisions that others did not make.

By looking beyond the numbers and using new approaches, we were able to find the nuanced drivers behind this election and make the right choice.

Two Senate races remain uncalled, with Democrats maintaining their leads in Arizona and Nevada, which would give Republicans a 52-to-48 seat majority, a gain of three seats.

Democrat Ruben Gallego leads Trump ally Kari Lake in Arizona by less than two points, with 79% of the vote to take Kyrsten Sinema’s seat.

In Nevada, incumbent Jacky Rosen leads Republican Sam Brown by just over a point with 95% of the vote, while Nevada polling expert Jon Ralston declaring it’s game over for Brown.

The House of Representatives results continue to evolve slowly, with Republicans holding 212 seats, six of which are unable to maintain their majority.

Democrats have won 200 seats and hold the lead in 12 of the uncalled races, which would put them at 212, a loss of one seat from their minority position in 2022.

Lakshya Jain, a polling analyst for Split Ticketgave Democrats no more than a 15% chance of late voting, giving them the comebacks needed to win a shocking majority.