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While Joe Biden is comfortably beating Donald Trump in national polls, two days before Election Day, a new Iowa poll on Saturday night showed the president was up seven points.
As Trump enjoyed the same Iowa lead over Hillary Clinton days before winning the 2016 election with narrow victories in key Midwestern states, the news could well shake up Democrats who are eagerly awaiting Tuesday’s decision.
In the poll, conducted by Selzer & Company for the Des Moines Register and Mediacom between Oct. 26-29, Trump led 48% to Biden’s 41%. In September, the same poll showed the two men were tied at 47 percent.
Four years ago, Trump won Iowa by 9.4 points. Selzer’s poll involved 814 likely voters and had a 3.4 percent margin of error. J Ann Selzer, president of the polling company, said independent men and politicians continued to support Trump.
“The president has demographics that he won in Iowa four years ago, and that would give someone a certain level of comfort with his position,” Selzer said. “There is a consistent story in 2020 with what happened in 2016.”
He added that since “none of the candidates reaches 50 percent, there is still some game here.” But he also said the data indicated that 94 percent of “likely voters” had decided how to vote, including 98 percent of Biden supporters and 95 percent of Trump supporters. A mere 4 percent of likely voters said they were still persuasive.
Among survey experts, reaction to the Iowa survey was mixed. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com wrote that the poll did not herald a savage turn on Trump across the board.
“One thing to keep in mind if you see a late voting move in a state is whether the move is in line with the fundamentals,” he wrote. “In Iowa, for example, our model thought that Trump ‘should’ have been ahead by three points based on polls in similar states, even swing, and so on. It is quite red.
“So the Selzer poll, which brought our average there from Biden +0.1 to Trump +1.8, as big a shift as you’ll see, aligned the race more with the fundamentals there. The same would be true if, say, Biden had a couple of rough polls tomorrow in Texas. “
Nate Cohn of the New York Times noted that Selzer’s poll was “the best result of the president’s poll in a long time, perhaps in the election cycle.
“However, it’s also worth noting that Selzer may be wrong, and has been before. No pollster has been put on a higher pedestal, but in the end everyone in this business is subject to sampling errors and so forth. If you expect perfection, you will not get it.
“And this Selzer Iowa poll goes by itself, not just in Iowa but in terms of the general story. Every national poll has shown Biden far ahead of Clinton among white voters. [and] white working-class voters. He has excelled at the northern white level. “
Both candidates still compete for Iowa. Biden held a drive-in movie in Des Moines on Friday and Trump, who was in the state in October, was to host a rally in Dubuque on Sunday.
Nationally, Biden outperformed Trump between 51% and 41% in the most recent Reuters / Ipsos poll. Sunday’s new polls also put Biden up nationally and in key states on the battlefield, though races were tightening in Pennsylvania and Florida, two of the most contested awards.
Are Trump’s demonstrations spreading the coronavirus?
Economists at Stanford University estimate that Trump’s campaign rallies have resulted in 30,000 additional confirmed cases of Covid-19. What’s more, they also say that the ralles likely caused more than 700 deaths overall, according to a newspaper published online this weekend.
The research, led by Stanford University chairman of economics B. Douglas Bernheim, analyzed data after 18 Trump rallies held between June 20 and September 22, three of which were indoors. Bernheim said the work relies on statistical methods to infer causality after an event has occurred.
Infectious disease experts have long suspected that the president’s rallies before the Nov. 3 election could be so-called super-spread events. But so far, scientists haven’t been able to get a good reading on its impact, in part due to a lack of robust contact tracing in many states.
What is the concern?
In recent months, Trump has held several dozen rallies in states such as Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin, where coronavirus infection rates were already on the rise.
In each event, it was estimated that several thousand people participated. While most of the rallies were held outdoors, video footage shows that participants gathered very closely and many were not wearing masks, creating a risk of spreading the virus while cheering for their candidate.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that large unmasked gatherings are likely to spread the virus, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety.
Adalja said the Stanford document was “suggestive” of propagation of the events, but not definitive because it was not based on an investigation of real cases. That would help confirm whether participants were exposed to the virus at the event, rather than other places where transmission is rampant.
What do we know?
Minnesota public health officials have attributed four Covid-19 outbreaks and more than 25 cases to Trump rallies held in the state in September and October.
An additional 11 state health departments contacted by Reuters said they had not been able to trace the infections until the rallies, although some, including Michigan and Wisconsin, have determined that individual people who later tested positive for Covid-19 were present at campaign events. of Trump.
What data do you need?
Disease experts say that rigorous follow-up of contacts for such a large event could help arrive at an accurate prediction of how infectious those events may be.
But the United States has lagged behind other developed countries in this regard, due to a lack of funding and coordination for contact tracing by the Trump administration.
“The problem is, we haven’t done anything to get real numbers,” said Dr. Eric Topol, a genomics expert and director of the Scripps Translational Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Instead, it is subject to guesswork and mathematical modeling.
For example, scientists can use gene sequencing to track minute changes in the virus’s genetic code as it passes from one person to another, allowing them to develop a map of where the virus travels. This work has been used outside the United States, including in Australia and Hong Kong, to track Covid-19 outbreaks.
“If we had a rally where there was a definite crawl, then it could be extrapolated. But we haven’t had any. Our country has behaved as if contact tracing does not exist, ”said Dr. Topol – Guardian / Reuters
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