If there was any consensus to be found in the 2024 election polling, it was that the outcome was going to be decided by a razor-thin margin.
In reality, Donald Trump swept all seven swing states against Kamala Harris, in addition to capturing the popular vote by millions. Republicans also regained control of the U.S. Senate and look poised to hold onto their majority in the House of Representatives.
This now marks the third general election cycle in a row (not to mention the midterms in between) where almost all the pollsters got it wrong… like, really, really wrong. And on Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by the hosts of The Fifth Column – Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch – to discuss the staggering miscalculation and how Trump cruised to victory.
The Red Wave
With three Alaska, Arizona, and Nevada yet to be called, Trump holds a 292 to 224 victory in the Electoral College over Harris and has captured 51.0 percent of the popular vote to his opponent’s 47.5 percent.
The so-called “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin broke for the GOP candidate, which helped seal Trump’s all-but-certain sweep of the seven swing states. Trump’s coattails also proved to be long enough to take control of the U.S. Senate.
Incumbent Sens. Ted Cruz and Rick Scott successfully fended off challenges to their seats in Texas and Florida, while the Republicans flipped seats in West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio with potentially a couple more to come.
The Polling Problem
All of this amounted to a decisive victory for Trump and the Republican Party that you never would have seen coming if you were going off the polls. “Can we just start with the total and utter collapse of polling? Polling, again, is a lie. They don’t know anything,” Megyn said. “We were told it was so tight, tight, tight. No one said he was running away with it.”
While Megyn credited her guest on Monday’s show and Election Night Special, Henry Olsen, for accurately predicting the outcome along with a couple other polling organizations, many of the major players got it wrong. “Nate Silver didn’t know what he was talking about, and neither did Nate Cohn over at The New York Times,” she explained. “And Ann Selzer of The Des Moines Register was a total and utter fail in Iowa.”
Moynihan noted that Silver actually proved to be right on one thing – no one wanted to get it wrong and, therefore, got it wrong. “Nate Silver was right about one thing, I think, when he said that what is happening with these polls is nobody wants to go out on a limb because they all want to be in the same space,” he said. “That seems to be true.”
What instead proved to be right were prediction markets like Polymarket, which, Moynihan said, represents “kind of the wisdom of the crowd.”
‘America Did This’
And then there is the coalition of support Trump built among demographics that were once staunchly on the Democrat side. “Let’s talk about how this happened because if you look at the coalition that put Trump over the edge, it was working class men and women. It was black men, and it was Latinos – especially men, but also women,” Megyn explained.
Meanwhile, women did break for Harris over Trump, though not at the rate they were expected to. “There was not some huge disproportionate female vote that helped her,” Megyn added. “The women did go more for Kamala than they did for Trump, but it was not the huge disparate number that would have counterbalanced his strength with men.”
Pundits and pollsters alike will no doubt be dissecting who broke for Trump versus Harris at what rate and for what reasons for months and years to come. In Welch’s view, there needs to be a lot of soul searching in the media and among the “identity politics” crowd as to why Trump succeeded.
“He got 51 percent of the vote… which is absolutely decisive and means [their] theory of the case is wrong,” he concluded. “You can slice and dice it and say, ‘Oh, the women did this, and the Hispanics did this.’ No, America did this.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with The Fifth Column by tuning in to episode 937 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.