This is the Cato Daily podcast for Friday, November 8th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Some substantial demographic swings characterized this presidential election, the one that

delivered Donald Trump back to the White House.

And at the center of it, Cato's director of polling, Emily Egan, says, are two issues, immigration and inflation.

We spoke yesterday.

This was a remarkable election.

It's, I feel like, at least our third remarkable presidential election in a row.

And the common factor in all of those is that Donald

Trump was on the ballot. And so if you don't mind, give us just the very quick, big picture

of what you were paying attention to in particular as states reported their vote totals.

Oh, absolutely.

Well, the first thing I want to say is Trump did it again, meaning that he outperformed his polls.

And that's exactly what every pollster was looking for this election season was, is Trump going to outperform his polls again, like he did in 2016, like he did in 2020,

and as it seems he did again in 2024? To be clear, this isn't a problem that happens in every

election. So some people might say, well, this is just every election the polls are wrong?

No, in the midterms, 2018, 2022, they were pretty accurate.

There's something unique about having Trump on the ballot that pollsters are missing.

And I think it's a couple of things. The first and the most important issue that I wrote about for

538 right after the 2020 election is this concept called non-response bias. And what that means is

that there is a certain subset of people who are going to vote for Donald Trump who just will not

talk to pollsters. And you can't easily correct this in surveys. So to your question about what was I

...