One Day More
A day out from the US Presidential Elections, our Co-Editor Luis Gonzalez goes over where the candidates stand, and what they've been doing.
Back in 2016, journalists, observers and voters all thought that they were witnessing the most troubled Presidential Election to date in the United States. While they were right, they probably didn’t expect to be reliving that same situation four years later. But putting aside the doubts over the concession of the elections, the legitimacy of the process (see also), and the stores on New York’s Fifth Avenue that spent the weekend boarding up their windows, let’s take a moment to check on the polls and what the two candidates have spent these last few hours up to.
The National Polls
Quinnipiac’s October 22 National Poll puts Biden up 51-41, continuing the trend that the Connecticut pollster had observed at the end of September. The Guardian’s poll tracker has Biden up 8.6 percentage points, while Rasmussen’s latest national poll published this morning also shows Biden ahead, albeit by an extremely narrow margin (48-47).
But national polls are tricky because they track the popular vote, and the popular vote isn’t the one that gets the President elected. The national polls are a good tool to get an overall sense of how people view the candidates at large, but if you want to get closer to the possible results you’ll have to take a look at individual state polls, particularly the states with close races.
The Swing States
The closest margins will be found among just a handful of states that the press will spend covering all night tomorrow. Some of those critical states are Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. Between those four you have a total of 83 electoral votes which will get either candidate pretty close to a victory.
The Guardian’s tracker has Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan as likely Biden wins, with Trump taking Ohio. But the Florida and Pennsylvania races are getting tighter. The Guardian has Biden up in Florida and Pennsylvania 1.8 and 5.6 percentage points respectively. While Quinnipiac has Biden up in Ohio, with the Florida and Iowa races too close to call. If you check out their methodology you’ll see that Quinnipiac estimates their margin of error at +/- 2.7 percentage points, which makes all these calls even closer.
A good rule of thumb when reading polls is that anything within 3 percentage points is usually a coin toss.
The Campaigns
Donald Trump is in North Carolina today where the Real Clear Politics tracker has him up 47.8-47.2 to Joe Biden. Trump’s scheduled to hit up rallies in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin later today, states where he’s lagged behind Biden in these past few weeks. While Biden opened the day in Ohio where he’s 1.5 percentage points behind Donald Trump, and should be headed to Pennsylvania later today.
One curiosity is that they’ve both left Florida off their schedules today, one of the tightest swing states that offers a whopping 29 electoral votes, it’s likely that campaign analysts have concluded that Florida’s so close that visiting today won’t make a difference. Judging from the states the candidates have chosen to visit, it would seem their goals are to try and keep the gaps close and well within the polls’ margin of error calculations in decisive areas.
More of our electoral content:
The pandemic is, in the end, a warning to all about the importance of electing and having world leaders who are well prepared and trained to respond to situations of extreme urgency.
It is impossible not to think of self-fulfilling prophecies when we talk about our elections. The more our politicians claim we’re on the edge of absolute destruction, the more radicalized people will become, and the less they’ll believe in the system.
It is safe to believe that another four years of the current administration will lead to more of the same. More unpredictability, more doubts about what America stands for, more distrust of our allies and more of the US playing into the hands of hostile nations that care not for the values our society holds, we’d do well to remember the last four years as a whole, even when recent legitimate success could cloud our vision.