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Americans will elect their president in three weeks. And right now, things are not looking good for the incumbent. On the contrary: if the polls are correct, that is, if the results of Election Day more or less reflect the values of the current polls, then Donald Trump will experience defeat on November 3. And not only brief, but enormous: a defeat of humiliating and enormous dimensions.
The numbers are clear. In the national average for polls, continually calculated by the FiveThirtyEight polling institute, Democrat Joe Biden led Tuesday afternoon with 52.3 percent of the vote. Trump came in at just 41.9 percent, a difference of 10.4 percentage points. It is not clear how the president intends to make up this gap in three weeks, provided there is no dramatic turn in the election campaign.
However, the informational value of national surveys is limited. The presidential election is decided in individual states, which have different numbers of votes in the Electoral College depending on the size of the population. This “electoral college” elects the president, and 270 votes are needed to win the electoral college. That means: it is quite possible for a candidate to get absolutely fewer votes across the country than his opponent, but to win the presidential election because he wins in the decisive states. That was in 2000, when George W. Bush won, and in 2016, when Trump won.
Donald Trump en route to an election campaign appearance
(Photo: AP)
In 2016, polls predicted a victory for Democrat Clinton
But measured by the distribution of votes in the Electoral College, Biden is far ahead of Trump. The website 270ToWin.com proposes 290 votes to Democrats based on current polls – also at lunchtime Tuesday – the incumbent president only 163. Therefore, 85 Electoral College votes remain controversial. But even if Trump won them all, it would not be enough to remain president.
The key question in all of these scenarios is of course: Are the polls correct? The answer is: maybe.
The truth is that this year election experts at least tried to learn from the troubles of 2016. At the time, their polls predicted a victory for Democrat Hillary Clinton. In fact, he got around three million more votes than Trump nationwide. However, polls in some very important states were overly optimistic. In Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Clinton lost by less than 100,000 votes overall. That was enough for Trump to get a majority of votes in the Electoral College. The fact that many media outlets very nonchalantly rounded to zero the probability of victory from 10 to 20 percent, which Trump had at the time according to almost all models, contributed to the surprise on election night.
Therefore, American pollsters have changed their assumptions and criteria for this year’s polls, for example in weighting according to the level of education of voters. This, as well as the expectation, should make it possible to capture the true composition of the electorate and thus more accurately reflect the political mood.
What this means in concrete terms for the evaluation of polls can be explained using the example of the three states mentioned above that held elections in 2016: In October 2016, Clinton in Pennsylvania was an average of 6.6 percentage points ahead of Trump. In Michigan he led with 7.5 points, in Wisconsin with 7.4 points. Four years later, Biden is an average of 7.1 percentage points ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania, eight points in Michigan and 7.6 points in Wisconsin. Biden’s leadership today is greater than Clinton’s four years ago. But the Democrat is not so far advanced as to conclude that the elections are over. Trump’s chance of victory may be small: FiveThirtyEight gave him just 13 percent on Tuesday, but it exists and it is not zero.
If you also consider that Trump can lose two of these three states and remain president, assuming he wins all the other states again, the ones he won in 2016, then Biden’s leadership is anything but bomb-proof. The bottom line is that, at least in the highly controversial so-called rust belt states, it is less than a percentage point better than Clinton four years ago. It may be enough, but it is not guaranteed.
It is indisputable that the trend speaks against Trump
In the end, then, the assessment of the situation depends on whether the pollsters are trusted: Did they correct the methodological errors in their surveys that falsified the results in 2016? So is Biden’s 7-point lead more valid today than Clinton’s 7-point lead, which turned out to be an illusion? Experts say yes, but what else should they say?
Biden’s supporters, however, rightly point out that their candidate also leads in many other states that Trump won in 2016 – for example, Florida or Arizona. Even traditional Republican strongholds like North Carolina or Texas could topple over and go to Biden. That would amount to a political revolution. Also, the number of undecided voters is much lower today than it was in 2016, around three to four percent instead of more than ten. Therefore, there is no deposit from which Trump can get many votes.
It is also indisputable that the trend speaks against Trump. Biden’s survey average has grown in recent weeks. The rude din in the first television debate with the Democrat and the Corona program apparently did not make the president more popular. Since the end of July, Biden has consistently been above 50 percent in national polls. Trump has never exceeded 43 percent since then.
All of this is why even seasoned members of the Republican Party believe that Trump’s chances of victory are not too high. Washington’s worst kept secret was that the president was heading for a crushing defeat, the magazine claimed a few days ago. Political – everyone knows it, but nobody dares to say it out loud. Trump “is in trouble, there’s no question about it,” Ari Fleischer, a former press spokesman for President George W. Bush, told the AP news agency. “From any point of view, it looks like a landslide victory for Biden.”
On the other hand, from any point of view, Hillary Clinton should have won the election in 2016. But Donald Trump won.
