Most polls indicate that today’s US presidential election between <a href="https://www.world-today-news.com/donald-trump-whats-behind-the-us-presidents-baltimore-attack/" title="Donald Trump: What's behind the US President's Baltimore attack”>Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will be very close.
However, some experts argue that the difference between the two rivals may turn out to be much greater than expected.
In the polls considered the most serious, the Democratic vice president and the Republican former president have a narrow margin in each of the key states that are expected to decide the outcome of today’s vote.
Thus, according to polls collected by the website FiveThirtyEight, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump were tied yesterday afternoon (47.8%) in Pennsylvania, almost tied (47.4-47.7%) in Nevada and they were separated by something like a percentage point in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina.
However, not everyone is convinced that this picture is completely accurate.
Maybe they are not so ambiguous after all
“In fact, the state-by-state polls are heralding not just an extremely lopsided race, but an incredibly lopsided race,” explains Joshua Clinton, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University.
In a study published this week by NBC, the polling expert cast doubt specifically on how “similar” the findings — their differences are in decimal numbers — of the available surveys, suggesting they may be pollsters, not voters. , those responsible for the apparent unanimity.
A pollster, for example, who sees a “five-point margin in a supposedly lopsided race may choose to alter his results to conform to what other polls show, out of concern that his reputation might suffer,” he speculated. .
Several polling institutes are on the defensive, faced with the high costs and increasing difficulties of contacting voters — in the age of smartphones and their capabilities such as call blocking.
The experience of recent electoral contests in the US does not exactly lead anyone to unreservedly adopt what they predict.
The pollsters turned out to be off in both 2016, when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, when Donald Trump was defeated by Joe Biden. The first time, they failed to adequately capture the view of the class of white men without a college degree — believed to have given the real estate mogul victory.
The second time, despite supposedly taking corrective action, they again underestimated the Trump vote and overestimated the Biden vote.
It cannot be ruled out that either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win outright in some or even all of the crucial seven contested states.
U. Joseph Campbell, a professor at American University in Washington, also wonders if pollsters are “twisting their data a little bit more to align it with other people’s results.”
The infamous precedent of 1980
This is something “difficult to prove” but is “suspected” by many as it responds to the “herd instinct”, he adds. Before referring to an infamous precedent: that of the 1980 presidential election.
At the time, “all the polls indicated a very close race between (Democratic) President Jimmy Carter and Republican (successor) Ronald Reagan,” but in the end the latter swept him, “by nearly 10%.”
“I’m not saying something like this will happen again in 2024, but we have to keep it in mind.
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#Election #lopsided
