FOR THE third presidential election in a row Donald Trump has stumped America’s pollsters. As results came in on election night it became clear that polls had again underestimated enthusiasm for Mr Trump in many states. In Iowa, days before the election a well-regarded poll by Ann Selzer had caused a stir by showing Kamala Harris ahead by three percentage points. In the end, Mr Trump won the state by 13 points.
Overall, the polling miss was far smaller. Polls accurately captured a close contest in the national popular vote and correctly forecast tight races in each of the battleground states. National polls erred by less than they did in 2020, and state polls improved on their dismal performances in 2020 and 2016. Yet this will be little comfort to pollsters who have been grappling with Mr Trump’s elusive supporters for years.
The Economist’s nationwide polling average found Kamala Harris leading by 1.5 percentage points, overestimating her advantage by around three points (many votes have yet to be counted), compared with an average error of 2.7 points in past cycles. State polling averages from FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit, had an average error of 3.0, smaller than the average of 4.2 points since 1976.
Chart: The Economist
But in contrast to 2016, when pollsters’ misses were concentrated in certain states, those in this cycle were nearly uniform across state and national polls. In the seven key states, polling averages underestimated Mr Trump’s margin by between 1.5 and 3.5 points (see chart). Pollsters may claim that their surveys captured the “story” of the election. But the awkward question remains: why did they underestimate Mr Trump for the third cycle in a row?
In past election cycles, pollsters have tweaked survey “weights” to make their samples of voters more representative. Although polls aim to sample the population randomly, in practice they often systematically miss certain groups. Weights are used to increase the influence of under-represented respondents. This has been especially true in recent years as response rates have plummeted.
After the 2016 election, when surveys systematically missed voters without college degrees and therefore underestimated support for Mr Trump, pollsters began accounting for respondents’ education levels. And after 2020, in an effort to ensure that Republican voters were represented, more pollsters began weighting their samples by respondents’ party registration and self-reported voting history. This caused the range of poll outcomes to narrow (weighting reduces the variance of survey results), with many pollsters finding similar results in key states and nationwide.
If there is a lesson from this year’s election, it could be that there is a limit to what weighting can solve. Although pollsters may artificially make a sample “representative” on the surface, if they do not address the root causes of differential response rates, they will not solve the underlying problem. They also introduce many subjective decisions, which can be worth almost eight points of margin in any given poll.
A pollster which gets those decisions right appears to be prophetic. But with limited transparency before the election, it is hard to know which set of assumptions each has made, and whether they are the correct ones. To their credit, the pollsters get together to conduct comprehensive post-election reviews. This year’s may be revealing. Still, without a breakthrough technology that can boost the representativeness of survey samples, weighting alone is unlikely to solve pollsters’ difficulty in getting a reliable read on what Trump voters are thinking.■
09 May 2025, Bavaria, Gmund Am Tegernsee: Katherina Reiche (CDU), Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, takes part in the Ludwig Erhard Summit. Representatives from business, politics, science and the media are taking part in the three-day summit. Photo: Sven Hoppe/dpa (Photo by Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Germany needs to take more risks and boost its stagnant economy with a decade of investment in infrastructure, German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Katherina Reiche said Friday.
“The next decade will be the decade of infrastructure investments in bridges, in energy infrastructure, in storage, in maritime infrastructure… telecommunication. And for this, we need speed. We need speed and investments, and we need private capital,” Reiche told CNBC’s Annette Weisbach on the sidelines of the Tegernsee summit.
While 10% of investments could be taken care of with public money, the remaining 90% relied on the private sector, she said.
The newly minted economy minister also addressed regulation coming from Brussels, warning that it could hinder companies from investments and start-ups from growing if it is too restrictive. Germany has had to learn that investments comes with risks “and we have to kind of be open for taking more risks,” she said.
“This country needs an economic turnaround. After two years of recessions the previous government had to announce again [a] zero growth year for 2025 and we really have to work on this. So on the top of the agenda is an investor booster,” the minister added.
Lowering energy prices, stabilizing the security of energy supply and reducing bureaucracy were among the key points on the agenda, Reiche said.
Germany’s economy contracted slightly on an annual basis in both 2023 and 2024 and the quarterly gross domestic product has been flipping between growth and contraction for over two years now, just about managing to avoid a technical recession. Preliminary data for the first quarter of 2025 showed a 0.2% expansion.
Forecasts do not suggest much of a reprieve from the sluggishness, with the now former German government last month saying it still expects the economy to stagnate this year.
This is despite a major fiscal U-turn announced earlier this year, which included changes to the country’s long-standing debt rules to allow for additional defense spending and a 500-billion-euro ($562.4 billion) infrastructure package.
Several of Germany’s key industries are under pressure. The auto industry for example is dealing with stark competition from China and now faces tariffs, while issues in housebuilding and infrastructure have been linked to higher costs and bureaucratic hurdles.
Trade is also a key pillar for the German economy and therefore uncertainty from U.S. President Donald Trump’s changing tariff policies are weighing heavily on the outlook.
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.
Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.
“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.
“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.
That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.
“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”
“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”
In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.
The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.
Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.
“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.
“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”
“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.