PENNSYLVANIA, USA — After former President and now President-elect Donald Trump's victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday's election, the post-election postmortem has begun, both in Pennsylvania and across the country.
Trump carried all seven swing states and increased his margin of victory across the board, while also winning the popular vote for the first time in three elections.
"I don't think anybody was really predicting a shutout in the seven battleground states," said Jim Lee, the CEO of Susquehanna Polling and Research. "He was leading in every state but Michigan and Wisconsin, but it was still all within the margin of error. So no one was predicting a red wave."
Lee says despite his own firm’s success with having Pennsylvania tied and Trump winning Nevada in its final poll, pollsters were not able to predict his margin with new and low-propensity voters such as younger men.
"It's hard to get enough of them in your sample to really trust the results you're looking at because you still want to do a poll with likely voters, which are people that have prior voting history in the past elections," Lee said. "So I don't think a lot of polling firms have enough of those low-frequency voters in their surveys."
The Harris campaign made a significant play for Republican voters dissatisfied with Trump, but Lee says those efforts did not pan out.
"The exit polling shows he got like 95% of Republicans, so the whole coalition of anti-Trump Republicans basically did nothing," Lee said. "They achieved nothing."
Lee says the lower turnout for this election compared to four years ago suggests this was less about traditional campaigning such as door knocking, and more about the issues themselves and voters’ dissatisfaction with the economy.
"This was not a turnout election," Lee said. "This was a persuasion election. It's the issues that drove people to the polls. It wasn't the phone call they got from their neighbor or the GOTV mailer they got from their state party."
Lee says pollsters overall did far better predicting Trump's margin in this cycle than in the previous two.
"You have to give the pollsters credit this cycle," Lee said. "Most of them showed the race really close in all the states, and even Trump's winning margin was still pretty close in all the states."