WASHINGTON: Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election four years ago questioned the reliability of opinion polls like never before. Can you believe them this time?
With 16 days until the Nov. 3 election, Democrat Joe Biden is ahead of Republican President by 9.0 percentage points nationally, based on poll averages. RealClearPolitics website.
But in the United States, candidates win the White House not through popular vote, but with the Electoral College.
In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but won enough states to get the electoral votes needed to become president.
This year, six states are considered key to winning the White House: Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
But if the polls are correct, Biden has the upper hand there, too, although he’s sometimes within the margin of error, which ranges from 1.7 percentage points ahead in Florida to 7.2 in Michigan.
Polls on the eve of the vote correctly predicted a slight national lead for Clinton, but “the place where the polls failed was in some of those swinging Midwestern states” that Trump eventually won, Chris Jackson of Ipsos Public Affairs he told AFP.
He said the lack of representation in polls of white residents without college degrees who voted for Trump was among the causes.
Most voting institutes say that this time they have corrected their methodology to avoid such mistakes.
Battlefield states that were not surveyed last time have been surveyed much more closely and more frequently.
Beyond that, pollsters note consistency: Since the spring, Biden has been in the lead with an average lead that has never fallen below four percentage points.
As a comparison, the Trump-Clinton voting lines were crossed twice, indicating an uncertain race.
Finally, in an extremely polarized country, there are far fewer undecided voters likely to upset the race at the last minute.
Some feel there are Trump voters reluctant to tell pollsters that they prefer him given the controversy surrounding the president.
“The polls were wrong last time, and they are more wrong this time,” Trump has said.
Trafalgar Group, a Republican-favored polling institute that seeks to employ a methodology to account for the possibility of reluctance, had been one of the few in 2016 that predicted that Trump would win Pennsylvania and Michigan.
This time, however, even they give Biden the upper hand in crucial states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Four years ago, the businessman and newcomer to politics was a novelty, and those candidates are always difficult for pollsters to evaluate.
“Everybody has an opinion on him now, so there is not the same level of surprise in Donald Trump,” Jackson said.
The New York Times has calculated that even if current state-by-state polls are as flawed as four years ago, Biden would still win.
“Mr. Biden is closer in our polling average to winning Texas, which would give him more than 400 electoral votes, than President Trump to winning in traditional states like Pennsylvania and Nevada,” Nate Cohn of the newspaper recently wrote.
Pollsters and analysts are still careful to point out that voters’ intentions are not a prediction and that there is still a margin of error.
Campaigns can be dynamic, and the last presidential election was probably decided down the stretch.
With 16 days to go in 2016, the FiveThirtyEight site gave Clinton an 86 percent chance of victory, about the same as Biden now.
In the United States, voter registration varies wildly, making it especially difficult to predict turnout.
Trump draws enthusiastic crowds at his rallies to argue the momentum is on his side, but will that translate to the polls?
Will Democrats who weren’t overly excited about Clinton, who was initially seen as winning in advance, line up behind a Biden in the middle of the road to go after Trump?
And what effect will the pandemic have?
“We have vote-by-mail and early voting that will be at historic levels,” Jackson said.
“We don’t know what effect it’s going to have. There are a lot of really complicated factors that come into play and they are the kinds of things that are difficult to explain for polls.
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