There is a huge vested interest in portraying elections in the US as very close, right up to election day. Each side likes to do so to prevent complacency among their supporter and to nudge people to vote, contribute money, and volunteer to do campaign work. The media loves it because it draws viewers and generates ad revenue. And there is a vast network of election pundits who are kept in business by blathering away about every little nugget of news to say how they think it will affect the election, even though they have no idea. Then there are the political consultants and media operatives who become more important in close elections, as campaign seek to squeeze out every advantage.
In this race, the Harris-Walz campaign keeps hammering on the theme that the race is nail-bitingly close and that all stops must be pulled out to prevent creepy Donald Trump from winning. It does not seem to matter what the polls say. The creepy Trump campaign has a bit of a problem in that their candidate likes to boast that he is hugely popular even to the extent that he would win California, which tends to depress turnout. To compensate, they are suggesting, with no evidence at all of course, that voting systems are corrupt and that mail-in ballots are a scam, and that Democrats have a huge operation in place to steal the election from creepy Trump and thus they need to be vigilant and vote in huge numbers.
Opinion polls are of course the main mechanism used to gauge the state of the race. There are many polls done by many different organizations and these naturally will give different results, not necessarily out of deliberate bias but because they use different methodologies, a phenomenon known as the ‘house effect’. What the media will do is give great publicity to whichever latest poll shows the closest gap and not publicize much those that seem to indicate that one candidate is drawing away. Polls that seem to show a tie seem to make them absolutely giddy with excitement.
As a news consumer, it is better to not pay too much attention to the breathless headlines that accompany some new poll and instead look at poll averages and see how they change with time, though even there there is a house effect depending on which polls are counted in the average and over what period they are taken. Averages are provided by The Economist, The Guardian, YouGov, Real Clear Politics, and 538. I play closest attention to Real Clear Politics because its house effect favors Republicans. In the US, national polls have limited value since it is the results in the swing states that really matter but they are not entirely valueless. But Democrats tend to need a +4% margin nationally in order to have a break-even chance of winning the presidential election.
Bear in mind that how poll samples are weighted are based on models that use data from past elections and those might not take into account subtle changes (such as the likely voting of different demographic groups), or hard to measure items like voter enthusiasm, or new factors. In this election, we are going to see for the first time what effect the overthrow of the Roe v. Wade decision in 2022 will have on the presidential race. We already saw that it had some effect in the mid-term elections in 2022 but now the full consequences of that are being seen in all its cruelty, coupled with the anti-woman rhetoric of weird JD Vance. How that will affect voter demographic and turnout is hard to predict.
“But Democrats tend to need a +4% margin nationally in order to have a break-even chance”
Consider how complacent and feckless the previous/current generation of Democratic leaders have been. They watched the supreme court steal the election from Al Gore but did nothing about the electoral college or the supreme court.
Nor have the Democrars reintroduced strong rules to prevent banks from taking great risks, or done anything about “regulatory capture”.
The leading Democrats have been so invested in status quo that populists can convince voters *they* are the only hope for change. So we got the Orange one. Thank you Bill Clinton, Obama etc.
A healthy democracy need a whole new posse of Democrats.
Democracy -- along with the abolition of slavery- is one of the finest things humans have achieved.
Naturally it was promply harnessed as a tool to get money/ views/ likes/ scare low-information voters into believing absurd things et cetera.
The nearest to a 4% margin recently was in 2012, when Obama had a 3.9% margin over Romney, and won the electoral college 332:206. In 2020, Biden had a 4.5% margin over Trump, and won the electoral college 306:232. So I think 4% is probably a slight over-estimate of the crossover point.
The electoral college is part of the constitution, which means in effect unchangeable unless both main parties agree.
I like electoral-vote.com because it uses nonpartisan polls that show reliability. Their focus is on the statewide polls for the 51 elections that matter. They have good statistical analysis and downloadable numbers.
Yougov has a quite good track record. But in reality you would need a substantial poll in every state every month; a side effect of the electoral college.
And as many have noted, media treat the whole business like just another horse race. I wonder if David Duke would be more successful if he tried to get elected today as there is so little emphasis on policies.
And honestly, the fact that the massively unqualified Donald Trump still has a non-zero chance of winning the election, even after the disaster of his last term, is not a good look for the state of democracy in the U.S. Or the state of connection to reality of large segments of the population.
I have no say in this election, being a Canadian, but I still have to live with the results, and I get to watch Canadian politicians take pages out of Trump’s playbook and far too many of them are having far more success than I’m comfortable with.
Lewis Black shares Mano Singham’s frustration about elections, and now the influencers are getting into politics, too!
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=5TeQPgGTBg8
In 2020 the final electoral vote was 306- Biden Harris 232-trumpence. That’s not particularly close, though the media spent many pixels claiming it was.
Ohio has 18 electoral votes and N.C. has 15. Between the ongoing bomb threats due to an idiot claiming that Haitians are eating pets in Ohio, and the outing of the Republican candidate in N.C. as a deeply creepy pervert who is bizarrely pro-slavery, maybe both states will have enough offended voters to flip blue and Biden-Walz will get a whopping 339 electoral votes.
Tethys, indeed.
In 2016, Trump received 304 votes and Clinton 227.
— https://www.npr.org/2016/12/11/505182622/fact-check-trump-claims-a-massive-landslide-victory-but-history-differs
(He still lied, of course)
Tethys, in 2020 Ohio had 18 electoral college votes and North Carolina 15, but owing to the 2020 census having changed the proportions of relative populations, in 2024 Ohio will have 17 electoral college votes (one fewer) while North Carolina will increase by one to 16.
If the 2020 election result were notionally repeated using the amended electoral college allocations post the 2020 census, then the 306-232 result would instead be 303-235. The electoral college is an example of nationwide malapportionment but the fact that the 2020 result is closer to parity using the updated census figures is not actually a measure that the electoral college has been made ‘fairer’ by virtue of the most recent census; merely that it is harder for a party winning the popular vote by millions to achieve a similar outcome in the electoral college. It’s still an extremely unfair system.