US election survey
On November 3, American voters will decide whether or not they want President Donald Trump to serve another term, or whether an unending Covid-19 coronavirus crisis, an economic crash, worsening race relations, the mockery of military martyrs, and several other scandals should be treated as disqualifying. The Republican is being challenged by Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years before his eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama. While Biden has several achievements during his nearly 50 years in national-level politics, the election is less of a comparison of the candidates’ respective visions for America and more of a referendum on Trump.
Pundits are having a field day with Biden’s struggles to mobilise left-leaning voters, but they ignore the fact that Biden is a ‘safe’ political centrist. This is why several prominent Republicans also refuse to back the dangerously far-right incumbent. The polling is also notable. While polls should be read cautiously — Trump was consistently polling behind Hillary Clinton in 2016 — the margins this time are telling. And while some may point to the pollsters’ failure to predict the winner in 2016, we must remind that they were technically not wrong. Clinton got 3 million more votes than Trump and only lost because of the electoral college.
Most major pollsters have now adjusted their methodology to give better weightage to voters without a college degree, who overwhelmingly voted for Trump, who once said, “I love the poorly educated.”
Despite the update, apart from ‘safe’ Democratic states, Biden is polling heavily ahead in almost every state considered to be at play. Meanwhile, Trump is actually struggling in some states that were once considered safely Republican. A candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win, and most polls suggest Biden already has that many in the bag, or at worst, would only need to win one or two of the 10 to 12 states ‘at play’. Trump would need to win all of them to get a second term.
That is why, in true autocratic fashion, he is covering for his waning support by claiming that the election is rigged.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 9th, 2020.
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