Five global stories to watch as the US waits for midterm election results
The US midterm elections, set for Tuesday, will be pivotal for the country.
Here are five key stories to watch as the US waits for the returns to determine the future of the next president.
1) On November 7, the world will hear the last presidential debate of the campaign season.
That is a big deal. The last presidential argument for more than 20 years, when candidates are asked for a few minutes of live TV airtime and, in the case of the Republican incumbent, an extra 45 minutes, is generally considered one of the highlights of an election cycle. But if Donald Trump fails to live up to his own polling expectations, he’ll be forced to spend time rehashing the last debate, which ended with him and Hillary Clinton both tied at 41 per cent in the Real Clear Politics polling average.
Here are five reasons it will be hard for Trump to win the presidency this time.
1. His campaign’s internal poll numbers have him within 1 percentage point of Clinton.
Trump’s campaign is averaging between 31-32 per cent in national polls, which is a fairly healthy start for an opposition candidate but nowhere near a path to victory. That leaves him with a long way to go.
As for the head-to-head national polling numbers, the best metric for predicting the outcome of an election is the average polling accuracy (also known as polls-to-polls) of all of the polls used by the campaigns and the candidates. The five major campaigns all have slightly positive numbers, which are not only a sign that they have the confidence of the voters in their field work, but also that the polls reflect actual voter choice.
But while Clinton’s average is the best among the five, Trump’s is the worst.
That is why it is so important that pollsters get out and do their own work to create models that can predict the winner of an election. In the event that Trump’s national polling numbers fall below Clinton’s, they will be used by journalists, political scientists, campaign strategists and campaign managers to guide their own forecasts to ensure that the narrative is set early on election night, setting the tone of
