America’s most respected pollster predicts Democrat landslide in US election
Three days before the US presidential election America’s most respected pollster predicts a Democrat landslide.
One of America’s most respected pollsters has predicted a Kamala Harris landslide in the dying day of the US presidential campaign, as Donald Trump and Ms Harris held duelling rallies in the swing state of North Carolina three days before the election.
The Vice-President held a rally on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina on Saturday (Sunday AEDT), speaking after Jon Bon Jovi riveted the crowd with his trademark song Livin’ on a Prayer, urging spectators to vote for the Democratic nominee.
“I have one simple question. Who can we rely on to unite us when we are at our most divided? It’s time we make our voices heard,” the rock star said.
His comments came as pollster Ann Selzer released a shock poll that put Ms Harris ahead of the former president in Iowa, a state that is historically solidly Republican, by three percentage points, a margin that extrapolated across the US would have Ms Harris win in a landslide.
“Releasing this poll took an incredible amount of guts because – let me state this as carefully as I can – if you had to play the odds, this time Selzer will probably be wrong,” respected pollsters Nate Silver said after release of the poll.
“Harris’s chances of winning Iowa nearly doubled in our model from 9 per cent to 17 per cent tonight, which isn’t nothing.”
The poll had Mr Trump’s chances of winning the election dip from 64 per cent to 55 per cent, according to the average of bookies’ odds tracked by RealClear Politics, a fall that came after a steady increase in the former president’s chances over the past few weeks.
The Selzer poll showed Ms Harris ahead of Mr Trump 47 per cent to 44 per cent among likely voters. This was a state Mr Trump won by eight points in 2020.
“Harris’s lead is within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points, and another pollster, Emerson College Polling, earlier on Saturday reported Trump ahead in the state by nine points,” The Wall Street Journal pointed out after its release.
“The poll’s finding that independents and women are turning away from Trump – women aged 65 and older favour Harris by more than 2-1 in the survey – will surely give Democrats heart that the poll is detecting broader trends that could be meaningful in the battleground states.”
Ms Harris told her supporters they had “three days left in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime”.
“And we still have work to do, but there’s the thing, we like hard work, hard work is good work, hard work is joyful work, and make no mistake we will win,” she said.
“This is not someone who is thinking about making your life better, he’s increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance.”
At his rally at Greensboro, a couple of hours from Charlotte, Mr Trump promised to slash taxes, and deport millions of illegal immigrants – a central theme of his campaign.
“When you’re winning by a lot, you could still lose by a little,” he said. “And we can’t take a chance of losing the great state of North Carolina. We’re not going to lose the great state of North Carolina,”
Former first lady Michelle Obama, delivering her own remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania, said “destruction” would be as “swift as it is merciless and no one knows where it will stop” if Mr Trump were elected.
“See, one day it’s coming for folks you’ve never met. Maybe it’s immigrants or black people or trans communities,” she said.
“Then it’s coming for a neighbour, a friend, a family member who is Puerto Rican or Jewish or Palestinian. Then it’s coming for you.”
Ms Harris wrapped her day on the campaign trail with a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live, mocking Mr Trump on the sketch show.
Appearing in the long-running series for the first time, Ms Harris appeared as her own reflection in a dressing room mirror, joining in good-natured mockery of her laughter and playing on her own name for laughs.
The show had Mr Trump on as the host first in 2004 and again when he was a presidential candidate for the 2016 election.
Additional reporting: AFP
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