Election Polls In 2020 Produced Error Of Unusual Magnitude, Expert Panel Finds, Without Pinpointing Cause More than eight months after the acute polling embarrassment in the 2020 U.S. elections - that produced the sharpest discrepancy between the polls and popular vote outcome since 1980 - survey experts examining what went wrong say they have no definitive answers about why polls erred as markedly as they did. Please share this article - Go to very top of page, right hand side, for social media buttons. That inconclusive finding reported by a polling industry task force will do little to assuage popular skepticism about election polls which, in one way or another, have misfired in all U.S. presidential races but one since 1996.