Who will win the 2024 presidential election?
Prognosticators of all kinds, whether pollsters, academics or international oddsmakers, are offering their own advice to voters who want to peer into a crystal ball predicting a future Kamala Harris or Donald Trump administration. This question troubles the country as it touts data and intuition.
No one knows what will happen on November 5th. Tens of millions of Americans have already cast their votes as part of early voting, and tens of millions more have yet to vote on who they want to lead the country for the next four years.
But the country is worried about the outcome as its political divisions become increasingly sharp.
More than seven in 10 American adults say the future of the country, the economy and politics are a “significant source of stress” for them personally, according to a report released this month by the American Psychological Association.
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“You can’t be passive, you can’t let people make assumptions, because this is a really big deal,” said Imani Cherry, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. This is especially important because this election is so important.” .
“There are a lot of very, very, very important issues on the minds of millions of people,” Cherry added.
As the unprecedented election between Harris and Trump comes to a close, experts say it would be irresponsible for political observers to predict a winner.
“A poll is not a prediction. It’s a snapshot in time,” said Republican pollster Robert Blizzard. “My job is not to try to predict outcomes. My job is to use polling to help candidates and clients succeed in their causes and issues.”
The 50-50 race was largely unfazed by major news events, including President Joe Biden’s summer resignation, lingering economic woes, Harris’ historic bid and two assassination attempts against President Trump.
Officials who spoke to USA TODAY said that in addition to a late-game rush to vote, partisan polls aimed at influencing their base and sports bettors looking to make money could lead to a White House vote for either Trump or Harris. He said any prediction of a victory over the House would be fraught with flaws. , and predictive models using companies with questionable backgrounds.
While some have pointed to the severe lack of high-quality polling in battleground states, typically conducted during the final weekend of a general election, news organizations should reconsider relying entirely on poll coverage. Some people think the time has come to do so.
“People need to get off the poll coaster. People need to step back from the poll coaster because they’re using it and they’re playing with our faces,” he said of Barack Obama in 2016 and 2006. said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who worked on President Obama’s presidential campaign. 2008 and 2012.
“It’s not the job of pollsters and pollsters to tell us the future, because we can’t do that,” he added.
Predict the winner of a horse race
In the United States, there hasn’t been a double-digit loss in a White House election since 1984, when Republican incumbent President Ronald Reagan cruised to victory, winning 49 of 50 states against Democratic challenger Walter Mondale. Not yet.
Since then, elections have been close, with Democrats winning the popular vote in the 2000 and 2016 elections but falling short in the Electoral College. Add to this a highly competitive media environment, and in 2024 there will be pollsters, pundits, and even commentators trying to give each side, and nervous and undecided voters, a heads up on what’s going to happen. Added to this is a cottage industry of gamblers.
Chief among them is FiveThirtyEight, which since 2008 has been the most popular database often cited by strategists, news organizations, and general audiences in the race to determine the most powerful job on Earth. It uses a complex statistical model of potential outcomes, which currently favors Trump in 51 out of 100 simulations.
But critics say people shouldn’t read too much into these models, given that people often use polling companies with different ratings of accuracy.
For example, FiveThirtyEight reported a few weeks ago that Harris had a better chance of winning than ever before, and that that could change if “some good polls” come out for the incumbent vice president. reminding people.
The site points out how “it’s a little better than flipping a coin for a strong candidate” when the odds of winning remain in the 50% range, its founder Nate Silver said in the New York Times. “It’s 50-50,” he said in an editorial. It is the only responsible prediction during this cycle. ”
And models aren’t always correct, as in the 2012 election, when then-President Obama went off the rails and defeated Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Trump similarly overturned predictions that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. Additionally, many companies underestimated his performance in 2020.
A question that worries experts in the final stages of the 2024 campaign is how predictive models could be affected by partisan efforts to increase candidates’ vote averages. But it’s likely that a group of supporters believes that’s what the candidate should do, which can be dangerous in an age of misinformation. Win based on voting trends and early voting data.
The New Republic reported earlier this month that a slew of pro-Trump polls were released over the summer in an attempt to influence a shift in election forecasts in Trump’s favor.
There are concerns, especially among Trump supporters, that if the former president loses, it could spark a reaction similar to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Republican polling firm Blizzard said it is not conducting research for the Trump campaign this year, but it has encouraged both sides of the partisan divide to mask bad polling and highlight only data that shows their campaign is doing well. He said it is certain that there are companies that are taking advantage of this.
“If I don’t know the pollster — if they don’t have actual clients, don’t have a clear track record, or only poll horse races — I’m less likely to care about their numbers. “It’s probably even lower,” he says.
Blizzard says most polling for the campaign has ended at this point, and legitimate companies have moved on to using their data to make decisions about advertising and other resource allocation. .
What experts worry more about than villains trying to manipulate the narrative are those who understand that a one- or two-point lead can statistically go either way. It’s about how little there is.
Cheary, the media and public relations professor, said news organizations play an important role in this conversation because poll stories are easier to inform viewers.
He said there was a need to further emphasize the impact of the policy differences between Harris and Trump.
Rather than making predictions or entertainment-style coverage of who will win, Ms. Cheary engages her students in grassroots conversations among voters about the stakes of the White House election and how people can participate in the democratic process. He said he is concentrating.
“I don’t think polls don’t have a role in this political debate, but polls are often very short-sighted,” she says. “Especially when you’re really talking about a lot of variables that are going to influence people’s choices, and you’re saying, ‘All the polls said[Trump]was going to win, and he didn’t win. — especially for those who might say, ‘It was fraud.’
“An ambiguous and dangerous business”
Some 34 million Americans have already voted early in 2024, giving Democrats a slight edge, according to the University of Florida Elections Research Institute, which tracks the numbers daily.
For example, it has been shown that approximately 41% of votes cast came from registered Democrats, compared to 35% from registered Republicans. But people who have been measuring the mindset of American voters for years say there are also risks in digging too deeply into early voting data.
First, much of the early voting data is based on states where people are registered by party. Another caveat is that the baseline comparison is the 2020 election, when voting access was expanded for the first time in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Kathy J. Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, has been surveying black and Hispanic voters for several months as part of the university’s youth project, GenForward.
She says the average American doesn’t understand the limitations and nuances of polling data, such as sample size, demographic representation, and the wording and order of survey questions. Cohen said everything influences each finding.
“There’s a big difference, a big gap, between the people who answer surveys and the people who put on their coats and get in their cars and get on the bus and stand in line and make sure they’re registered to vote,” Cohen said. he said.
Rather than paying attention to possible outcomes, political observers should focus on trends throughout the election cycle. But that doesn’t preclude other groups and entities from filling the void, as more established companies look set to take a step back in 2024.
A number of offshore gambling markets, including Polymarket, the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading platform, have been mentioned by Trump and his allies, with predictions that the Republican Party will win a nonconsecutive second term as president. . A French trader reportedly bet a total of $28 million in four different accounts on a Republican candidate returning to power.
BetOnline.ag spokesperson Joshua Burton said the popularity of betting on US elections, from who wins to turnout, has skyrocketed over the past decade.
“It’s going to eclipse the Super Bowl in terms of the stakes, because there are so many big bettors who are going to bet on who wins this election,” Barton said in an interview. Ta.
While some may not bet anything for the next four years, participants want to take action on the results, he said.
It remains unclear how well these and other indicators, such as the level of the stock market before the presidential election, predict whether Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris will win. But the issue raises concerns for Cohen and other academics who argue that polls should be focused on revealing how Americans think, rather than fortune-telling or making money. I’m holding you.
“We can use them to give some predictions, but we’re wary of placing too much weight on a sense of what’s going to happen based on polls,” she says.
“When we talk about human behavior, it’s a fuzzy and dangerous business.”
