Election polls this year are less likely to undercount former President Donald Trump's support, as happened in 2016 and 2020, according to people overseeing surveys.
This year's Republican presidential nominee overperformed his polling numbers on Election Day in both previous runs for the White House.
Trump this year opposes Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat nominee, in a race that most polls indicate is a toss-up, with seven battleground states likely to determine the outcome.
"Pollsters certainly have made changes to how we do polls to try to reduce this problem," Marquette Law School pollster Charles Franklin said, Newsweek reported.
"Whether they work, we won't know till early November."
Sam Chen, a Pennsylvania-based GOP strategist, said Republicans shouldn't discount the polls this time around.
"One of the mistakes the Republican Party made in 2020 was assuming that the silent [Trump] majority would stay silent. The reality was they already spoke up," Chen said, Newsweek reported. "I don't think the Trump vote is being undercounted as much as it used to be."
Politico last year reported that Trump in 2020 attracted significant numbers of people who had rarely, if ever, voted and who either weren't included in polls or refused to participate in them.
Trump supporters also were less likely to respond to pollsters after their preferred candidate had trashed the integrity of surveys.
"People who support Trump are mostly quite distrustful of the news media and other institutions, and that includes pollsters," Franklin said. "It's not that they do the [poll] interview and say they're not voting for Trump but then do. It's that they won't do the interview to begin with."
Ipsos pollster Cliff Young said the larger problem is deciphering out how to capture the sentiment of likely Trump supporters who don't typically vote.
"This is a problem on the margins," he said.
This year, pollsters insist they've gotten better at capturing likely Trump supporters.
"Many pollsters today are using past vote [history] to correct for the Trump undercount," Young said, Newsweek reported.
Pollsters say adjustments — such as increasingly drawing from voter registration databases instead of relying on randomized lists of telephone numbers — in their methodology ensure an accurate mix of Democrat and Republican voters.
Pollsters also have weighted their results for education to make sure they accurately capture non-college voters who lean toward Trump, Newsweek said.
In 2016, pollsters undercounted voters without college degrees — especially the swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. That led to many surveys saying Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton was leading Trump by several percentage points overall.
The Trump campaign has insisted the former president is "dominating" in polls with two months to go in the election.
"Polling shows President Trump is dominating both nationally and in the battleground states because voters want a return to pro-America policies that actually work," Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek.
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.