United States. Donald Trump on his way to defeat

Joe Biden is on the verge of getting the 270 votes in the electoral college he needs to win the US presidential elections. The elections may already be set in Georgia, a historic Republican bastion, where Democrats are ahead. Things should only get worse for Donald Trump in this state – most of the untold votes are from Atlanta, a city with a huge proportion of blacks, overwhelmingly Democratic. Winning in Georgia, ahead in Nevada, even though Biden loses Pennsylvania – where he also stepped into the lead this Friday – the only setbacks on his way to the White House are potential vote recounts in states like Wisconsin, Michigan or Arizona. Something that can make the results drag on for a while.

Trump’s reaction was pure denial. «If you count the legal votes, I won easily. But if they count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the elections », declared the President at a press conference, speaking of an alleged electoral fraud, of which no evidence was presented. “As everyone saw, we won with historical figures,” he continued.

“There was a red wave and it was properly recognized by the media,” said Trump, referring to the republican color, in a speech completely disconnected from reality. In such a way that some of the biggest American channels chose to cut it, giving voice to fact-checkers instead.

“We are in the uncomfortable position of not only interrupting the President of the United States, but of correcting him,” admitted the host of MSNBC, a station aligned with the Democrats. Fox News, the conservative channel that has acted as a kind of unofficial spokesman for the President in recent years, seems to be divided, in an internal war between its journalistic and opinion section.

On the one hand, Fox News analysts were even the first to project Biden’s victory in Arizona, a decisive swing state, infuriating the Trump campaign, which even contacted the station’s owner, tycoon Rupert Murdoch. On the other hand, Fox News opinion stars, like Sean Hannity, openly disputed the conclusions of analysts on his channel, who gave orders to the pivots to never refer to Biden as “President-elect”, keeping the contestation open. by Trump. “We will report on both sides until further notice,” read the memo, seen by CNN.

Even the Murdoch-owned New York Post tabloid, which during the campaign sparked allegations of corruption against Biden’s son, Hunter, turned on the President with the headline: ‘.

For the President, that there is even doubt about who Rupert Murdoch’s media should support is a pain in the heart – revealing how much the Republican establishment is starting to abandon him. “Why do you think Rupert attacks me so often?” Trump asked Christopher Ruddy, founder of the conservative media group Newsmax, according to the Financial Times. «Rupert always tells me in the face that he adores me, but I don’t think so».

The marriage between Trump and the media conglomerate Murdoch did not have an easy start. In 2016, when the future President was fighting for the nomination as Republican candidate, Fox News fiercely criticized him – they quickly reversed, in the face of a drop in hearings from which he only recovered after re-approaching Trump.

Now, rumors are emerging that Trump is considering launching his own channel after the elections. Something that was related to the fall in Fox News shares on Wednesday, according to the Financial Times.

Polling failure

The President’s speech also included criticism of the failure of the polls, which for months predicted a great victory for Biden, instead of the timid margin he obtained. «They thought there was going to be a big blue wave. This was false, and it was done for reasons of suppression, ”criticized Trump. “I have to call them imposter polls, fake polls, designed to keep our voters at home, to create the illusion of Biden’s momentum.”

However, there are more mundane explanations for the new poll failure, which in 2016 predicted Hillary Clinton’s victory. Part of the discrepancy can be justified by the complexity of the US electoral system, which gives a state’s total votes to the winner. Just slight fluctuations in the right places can completely change the results.

However, this year’s national polls did not do much better than polls in swing states. On the morning of November 3, a compilation of polls from RealClearPolitics gave Biden a resounding 7.4% margin; hours later, it was clear that the real margin would be just over 2%.

“After my predictions, which gave 98% a chance that Hillary Clinton would win on election day, collide with the fact that Trump’s victory, I spent a lot of time considering what went wrong,” admitted Natalie Jackson, on the polls website aptly called Sabato’s Crystal Ball, or ‘Sabato’s crystal ball’.

At a time when surveys are increasingly telephone-based, especially this year, with the covid-19 pandemic, “the ideal framework has not applied since the mid-2000s, when people switched landlines to mobile phones,” wrote Jackson . With cell phones came call recognition – in a world with more and more commercial calls, who is still answering unknown numbers?

The percentage of people responding to polls has plummeted in recent decades, from 36% to 6%, according to the Pew Research Center.

Some analysts point to another pattern, what they call ‘Trump’s shy voter syndrome’. In other words, “in an America where Trump supporters are routinely called racists, it is not surprising that many prefer to keep their political orientation to themselves,” explained American analyst Salvatore Babones, in a column in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Another factor is Trump’s constant attacks on polls, as we’ve seen in recent days. These attacks are fueled by the fact that they systematically underestimate the weight of their supporters, which makes it more likely that their supporters will not respond to inquiries in a vicious circle.

The constant errors in the polls not only impact the credibility of the journalists who broadcast them, but also have real effects in the political dispute. “Some research shows that forecasts of elections that are too secure for any candidate can lower voter turnout, which can lead to more just races,” warned Jackson.

Another factor is that electoral campaigns are often designed for polls, especially in an electoral system as complex as that of the USA, in which the winner of a state gets all the votes. “If the polls have been so wrong for months, data that has been quite stable since then, that means campaign resources may also have been misallocated,” noted Professor Nick Beauchamp, of Political Science at Northeastern University, on the college’s website.

For example, why would Democrats have to invest a cent to campaign in Ohio, North Carolina, or Texas, all Republican bastions, if it weren’t for the polls to give them a chance of victory? Instead, they buried millions of dollars in these races, without seeing the promised red tide, winning by very short margins in states where they were stronger, like Michigan or Wisconsin – being subject to potential recount of the votes.