[ad_1]
© Associated Press
Opinion polls on the American elections show two things: President Donald Trump has never had more than 50 percent approval during his tenure, and his opponent, Joe Biden, has consistently led him with about 10 percent of approval. support for. In theory, the only way Trump can win is if the statistics are too confusing.
This has already happened.
In 2016, to the surprise of sociologists and the media, Hillary Clinton won the support of more people in number, but due to the peculiarities of the American electoral system, Trump became president.
The reason: they are not solved directly. Each state sends a number of voters to the 538-member Electoral College, and they vote for president against the will of the state. Which means that it is more important which candidate wins more voters from different states than how many votes he gets from Americans.
How are the polls going now?
That is why the so-called “changing states” or “battlefields”: those whose populations do not vote firmly for one party or another, as in California or Texas, for example. In 2016, Trump surprisingly won with the support of several of those states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
© North Star Opinion Research
© North Star Opinion Research
Florida and Iowa are also important because they voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016, John McHenry, vice president of the Republican sociological agency North Star Opinion Research, told Dnevnik during a briefing organized by the State Department. . He also cites as disputed states in which the difference in the result of the two candidates in 2016 was less than 5 percentage points: Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Maine and North Carolina.
In all of them, Biden leads, albeit with single-digit support.
What went wrong then
This is also the key aspect. “Contrary to popular belief, the 2016 polls were largely accurate,” Doug Schwartz, vice president of the authoritative Quinnipiac University poll, told Dnevnik.
“National polls have shown that Hillary Clinton will win the popular vote by three percentage points, and won it by two. But there were polls in key states that made mistakes. The main reason for this was the people who decided at the last minute and at the Another reason was that some sociologists underestimated white voters with no higher education, and this is important because these voters supported Trump and were miscalculated in some polls in major states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with which Trump won one. little hint “.
Surveys are not forecasts, but snapshots.
Quinnipiac University survey vice president
The theory of “timid Trump supporters” also carries weight, Margie Omero of the GBAO democratic consultancy told Dnevnik. “If you take them into account, the race becomes much more contested. Perhaps there are people who are ashamed to say that they will vote because they are under social pressure not to support the president.”
© Associated Press
“However, I think it is more likely that people from the backward party do not want to participate in the polls. I think this is more plausible than someone lying that they are going to vote for Biden. There have been many experiments to see if the” shy “They exist and there is not much evidence that this is the case, but there are prejudices against answering, for example, people say” I do not want to talk about politics now “because their party is not doing well and they do not want to participate in the study. . “
