Emmanuel Macron’s 32-percentage-point victory in France’s presidential election runoff may end up being touted as a triumph for French pollsters, who consistently gave him a huge advantage. But it shouldn’t be. The polls leading up to the contest between the centrist Macron and his far-right opponent were the least predictive in French history, underestimating Macron’s support, rather than Marine Le Pen’s, to the surprise of some. [...]
The average poll conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign gave Macron a far smaller lead (22 percentage points) than he ended up winning by (32 points), for a 10-point miss. In the eight previous presidential election runoffs, dating back to 1969, the average poll missed the margin between the first- and second-place finishers by only 3.9 points. [...]
All that said, even the biggest polling miss France has ever seen isn’t a totally shocking result. With a limited sample size of previous elections (as is often the case), there’s a decent chance that the true margin of error of the final polling averages will be underestimated (i.e., you underestimate how many results are in the tail ends of the distribution). Before this year, there had been only eight previous French runoff elections with polling during the final two weeks of the campaign. That’s why I noted on Friday that the true margin of error in the French runoff polling was likely somewhere between 10 and 12 percentage points even though there had never been a runoff in which the polling average had missed by that much.2 [...]
Indeed, the French presidential election is the sixth consecutive European election in which the populist right-wing candidate or party underperformed its polling. This includes Le Pen in the first round of France’s presidential election. Of the European elections that have involved a far-right wing candidate or party and have taken place since Trump won the White House in November 2016, the only candidate or party to win when polling projected a loss was left-wing Austrian presidential candidate Alexander Van der Bellen. (Van der Bellen beat the far-right, candidate Norbert Hofer.)
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