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The Portuguese-American political scientist Daniela Melo, a professor at Boston University, admitted that despite the stability of the polls in recent weeks, “there are many factors” and that anything is possible. “There are paths to victory for both sides.” The vote-by-mail issue and the different accounting deadlines in the states make it possible for a legal battle to exist over the identification and certification of the winner. “Personally, I see a perfect storm here,” Melo said. “November will be a critical time for American democracy.”
Given that polls give Democratic candidate Joe Biden an average eight-point lead over President Donald Trump, Portuguese-American political scientist Daniela Melo says there is a misconception about what happened in 2016.
“The polls weren’t a big fallacy last time,” the political scientist, who teaches at Boston University, told Lusa. “At the national level, the polls have not failed in the least,” he said.
When then-candidate Donald Trump won the electoral college and defeated Hillary Clinton, commentators and analysts pointed the finger at the polls, as the prospect was for the Democratic candidate to be elected.
However, Daniela Melo explained, Clinton’s victory in the popular vote at the national level happened as expected. “The problem was the surveys conducted in states like Wisconsin and Ohio,” he explained.
The accounting for the 2016 election shows that Donald Trump won by a difference of just 77,744 votes, spread over Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and a subsequent analysis by the specialized platform FiveThirtyEight showed that the precision of the national polls of that year was similar. to that of previous elections. .
The problem is that “it is very difficult to conduct surveys in the United States,” stressed the professor, pointing to the dependence on landlines, a means of conducting research that is less and less reliable to obtain a representative sample.
According to Daniela Melo, polling companies have made an effort in the last four years to fine-tune research at the state level and have a better understanding of voting intentions.
“There are likely voters and registered voters. The probable ones gain more weight in the polls ”, explained the political scientist. “The model says that the most likely voters are the oldest: the older the voter, the more likely they are to vote,” he added. “Age is the most reliable element to predict the vote.”
On the other hand, “there was a lot of talk about the fact that when you were connecting with people they didn’t want to admit that they were going to vote for Trump,” the professor recalled.
“There was a certain shame, not in the working class, but especially in the upper social classes, white people with higher education.”
According to Daniela Melo, there was “a very big discrepancy” about what people admitted and how they voted. “This has changed radically” now, he considered, giving the example of the Portuguese descendant John Oliveira, a member of the school committee of the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, who put up an electrified fence to protect the pro-Trump poster that he displays in front of his house. .
A month before election day on November 3, Daniela Melo said that the polls have remained stable and that this time there is no factor of repulsion that led many people not to vote for the Democratic candidate four years ago.
“Biden may not be the best candidate, but he is not a Clinton,” the professor analyzed.
“Hillary was a symbol of everything that had gone wrong for the working class, a symbol of neoliberalism, of opening markets, of NAFTA,” he exemplified. “Joe Biden doesn’t necessarily promise an improvement on the various fronts that those who voted for Bernie Sanders want to see. But it promises to return to a certain normality ”.
For the political scientist, this may be enough in this electoral cycle. “The indications are that Biden will be able to attract a lot of votes from moderate and independent Republicans,” he explained.
“In a way, being moderate and promising a return to normalcy is enough to get these votes,” he said. “This is the real anti-Trump election.”
After the first debate with the president, during which there were insults and accusations, Joe Biden slightly increased his advantage. According to the average recorded by the FiveThirtyEight platform, the Democrat now collects 50.9% of voting intentions, compared to 42.7% for the president.
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