Skip to content

2020 President · NC

Data for Progress · fieldwork ended 2020-10-17 (17 days before the election) · 929 respondents · Online Panel/Text-to-Web · partisan sponsor (DEM)

The poll said

Democrat 48% · Republican 44%

D+4.0

The certified result

Democrat 48.59% · Republican 49.93%

R+1.3

The arithmetic

  1. Poll margin = 48 − 44 = 4.00
  2. Actual margin = 48.586 − 49.934 = -1.348
  3. Signed miss = 4.00 − (-1.348) = 5.348
  4. Absolute miss = |5.348| = 5.348

The poll overstated the Democrat by 5.3 points and had the wrong leader.

Where these numbers come from

Poll and result: 538 raw_polls.csv. Poll ID 71752, race ID 6238 (538 database).