While votes are still being counted in some places from last week's election, Donald Trump is likely to be the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in the last 20 years.

And yet, pre-election polls have consistently underestimated his support since he first ran eight years ago.

And that's left some folks spending the last week trying to figure out what happened.

NPR's Domenico Montanaro is here to help us, help walk us through what the pre-election polls got

right and what they missed. So let's start, Domenico. First, it's good to see you. Yeah, you too.

So help us remember what the polls said, what they said about support for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris nationally and in the battleground.

Well, I thought it was pretty interesting. If you look at the national polls, they got Kamala Harris's number exactly right.

If you look at the 538 final polling average before the election, it was 48 for Harris, 47 for Trump.

What did Harris wind up getting? She's at about 48.2 in the polls nationally or in the final election result. Trump,

though, at 50%. So the polls underestimated Trump's support again, which is what we saw in the last

two elections and did so by about three points on average. And when you look at the state polls,

it was also the same sort of story. Across all seven battleground states, Trump's support

was underestimated by anywhere from two to four points. And, you know, that they got pretty close

to what Harris's number was. But there are some things that the pollsters are going to have to

look at for the next election. I feel like we say that every election about what the polls are going to

have to do. I remember back in 2016 talking to voters and you'd say, who are you going

to vote for? And they'd say, oh, I don't like either of them. And it would take five or six

questions to get people to ultimately say, I'm going to vote for Trump. Like, the response bias

is real. Is that what accounts for the undercount this time around? No. I mean, the response bias is real, but that's not what accounts for what

was the, what we saw as the undercount, because the pollsters have really adjusted. They've

tried to really get more people to be able to respond since the 1980s. It's gone way, way down.

They've done a lot of work on mixed modalities. So it used to be live callers were the key gold

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