Megyn Kelly Reacts to Trump Victory: ‘Polling Is a Lie’

Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly has reacted to President-elect Donald Trump’s recent win, calling forecasts of his defeat “a total and utter fail.”
Many have been left surprised by the extent of Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, with the former president on track to secure all seven swing states and the popular vote despite the race being viewed as a coin toss before election day.
“Can we just start with the total and utter collapse of polling,” Kelly said during the first post-election episode of her Spotify podcast on Wednesday. “Polling is a lie. They don’t know anything.”
Numerous pollsters, including FiveThirtyEight and The New York Times/Siena College, had projected Harris as in with a chance of securing the popular vote, a few of this year’s battleground states, and the election as a whole.
FiveThirtyEight’s final election simulation published on November 5 projected Harris winning 50 times out of 100, with Trump winning 49 times. Separately, pollster Nate Silver said on his Silver Bulletin blog that his model indicated the election would be “literally closer than a coin flip.”
Kelly called out those behind many of these forecasts, including Silver, NYT chief political analyst Nate Cohn, and Ann Selzer, president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based polling firm which projected Harris “leapfrogging” Trump and flipping the deep red state, calling their predictions “a total and utter fail.”
The Associated Press called Iowa for Trump on Tuesday evening, with the former president beating Harris by a resounding 56 percent to 43. This prompted Selzer to reassess her firm’s polling method.
“Tonight, I’m of course thinking about how we got where we are,” Selzer said following the results. “I’ll be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that happened. And, I welcome what that process might teach me.”
Kelly, commenting on these projections which predicted a last-minute polling edge for Harris after a tight race, suggested that the pollsters were “doing these so-called polls through their lens of what they want to be,” before adding: “Who will pay attention to these people again?”
Newsweek has reached out to 538, Nate Cohn and Ann Selzer for a response to Kelly’s comments.
“You cannot believe in these people,” Kelly said. “I really do believe it was their own bias that pushed them—either subconscious or conscious bias—that pushed them into manipulating all of us, or trying to, to save her a** which was unsavable.”
Kelly, who worked as a host at Fox News between 2004 and 2017, endorsed Trump before the election, speaking at the former president’s final rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night.
Her endorsement came as a surprise to some, given Trump’s controversial “blood” comment about Kelly and her moderation of the 2016 Republican primaries.
“He got mocked by the left by saying he would be a protector of women,” Kelly told the Pittsburgh rallygoers. “He will be a protector of women and it’s why I’m voting for him. He will close the border and he will keep the boys out of women’s sports where they don’t belong.”
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