James Morrow: US election race tighter than polls suggest
The polls look bad for the Republican candidate — but guess what, they did at this point in 2016, too, and a closer look reveals a tighter race than the pundits suggest, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Some day, scientists are going to discover a parallel universe where the experts are always right and conventional wisdom is every bit a force of nature as gravity.
But until that day comes we will have to be content to muddle through in a world where what “they” say tends more often than not to be wrong — a world where, contrary to what those who know better predicted, Brexit did happen, Hillary didn’t, and Bill Shorten now lives under lockdown rather than in the Lodge.
Which brings us to the election taking place in the US in just about 14 days’ time.
Now, all the polls suggest that Joe Biden is going to romp it in.
MORE JAMES MORROW
Big Tech is hiding the truth about lockdowns
Trump’s man Pence comes out on top as Kamala flails
The show goes on for leading man Don
One of the leading averages of national polls puts Biden up by nine points across the US – and up by 4.5 points in the key battleground states.
On Sportsbet — often a more reliable indicator of these things — Biden has come in to $1.56, where Donald Trump sits on $2.50.
Hardly blowout territory, but you can see where this is going.
But, what if the pollsters are wrong? It wouldn’t be the first time and in fact, once you start to look below the surface, things start to appear a little different.
To Australians, the US voting system is bizarre. It’s non-compulsory, happens on a workday, and there isn’t even a sausage sizzle.
Oh, and there is also a massive effort to get people to vote early, because, as history has shown, turnout on the day can more than anything else mean the difference between success and failure on the night.
This year, Democrats have been counting on a big early vote and have been pushing people to vote either absentee (where they request the ballot) or by mail-in (where local officials send out blank ballots unprompted).
But the hope that these efforts will mean more Democrat votes are counted might not be fulfilled.
Take Michigan, which Trump won narrowly — by less than a quarter of a percentage point — in 2016, which he absolutely must win again if he has a hope of holding on to the White House.
According to NBC News’ election tracker, 41 per cent of mail-in and early in-person ballots have been returned by Republicans, 39 per cent by Democrats, with the rest from minor parties and independents.
And then there is Pennsylvania, another must-win state for Trump that tends to lean Democratic but where Biden is vulnerable due to his Shorten-esque on again, off again opposition to fracking.
An analysis by JPMorgan found that since the last presidential election, the Republican party has picked up around 200,000 voters, and Trump could win the state by substantially more than the 44,000 vote margin he enjoyed last time.
The study found that battleground states like Florida and North Carolina could be returned to Trump by even bigger margins than in 2016.
It’s a pattern that is being repeated elsewhere with studies that take a deeper dive finding that Supreme Court nominations, gun ownership trends, and increased African-American support suggest Trump’s position is stronger than headline polls suggest.
New Republican registrations (that’s another strange thing about America — you can register to vote with a party affiliation) are catching up with and even overtaking Democratic registrations, suggesting that either people aren’t telling the truth, or that there’s a big ‘shy Trump’ vote out there that is quietly coming home.
This may begin to explain why Democrats are acting in ways that might seem bizarre for the side that is enjoying a near double-digit lead.
Consider the reaction of the left to the story that a laptop had been found with thousands of emails potentially implicating Joe Biden and his son Hunter in corrupt dealings from China to Ukraine.
Rather than laughing it off with a denial and “there are more important things to talk about” — incidentally, the way the Clintons brazened out pretty much everything that came their way — there was a concerted effort to hide it completely.
Facebook and Twitter, both with strong ties to the Biden campaign, for a time made it all but impossible for voters to read about the scandal — paradoxically, increasing its impact.
Meanwhile, after months of an anaemic basement-driven campaign, Biden has been attempting to cobble together something of a public campaign, though he has often found the travelling press corps outnumbering attendees.
This may explain why the Biden camp has brought in Barack Obama to hit the trail for the Democrats in Pennsylvania, suggesting again that the state might be weaker for Democrats than polls suggest. It also suggests that the fact Biden is simply, at this stage in his life, not a strong campaigner, has sunk in with his team.
Does any of this mean Trump is going to easily re-sign his lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Of course not. Even if he were to repeat his 2016 win, the fact is that it is more likely than not that we will not know the results on the night. The Democrats have signalled that they have every intention of contesting the election, and Hillary Clinton has publicly advised Biden to, under no circumstances, concede.
And the biggest danger is a scenario that sees Trump eke out a narrow victory in the Electoral College, while the popular vote — pumped up by Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts in liberal cities — goes large for Biden.
This would see weeks of court challenges, demonstrations and delegitimisation campaigns aimed at causing so much chaos that Trump would be forced to step down, or Congress called upon to intervene.
But all that aside, it does suggest that polls, which have gotten so much wrong in the past, may again do so.
Remember, pollsters are only human and they suffer from the same confirmation biases as the rest of us.