“Elections in 15 days.
And the electoral map for Donald Trump is getting darker and darker, "- thus begins an article by Chris Sillitz and Aaron Blake, entitled" Trump's chances of winning are close to zero. "
Wait, but there are still 21 days before the elections!
Is there a mistake here?
There is no mistake.
Sillica and Blake's article was published in The Washington Post on October 24, 2016!
Based on opinion polls, Sillitz and Blake assured the reader then: Hillary Clinton “now has 323 electoral votes ... Trump has only 180 (remember: you need 270 to win) ... Wherever you look, Trump is inferior to Mitt Romney at that time in 2012 ...
And Romney received only 206 electoral votes and lost about 5 million votes in the national vote. "
Two weeks after this bold forecast, Trump received 306 electoral votes, and Hillary Clinton - 232. True, Hillary actually voted for 3 million more voters - but their votes, unfortunately for Madame-ex-Secretary of State, fell on the wrong states, which decided the fate of the elections.
Soon enough, Chris Sillica changed jobs and got a job at CNN - in order to continue to feed readers with fables about the inevitability of the victory of the Democratic Party candidate.
Almost all opinion polls currently being published in the United States train the voter to think that Biden will win the November 3 elections.
For example, a poll by The Hill / HarrisX shows Biden ahead of Trump by five points.
A poll by ABC News and The Washington Post gives Biden a 12-point lead.
But CNN is ahead of everyone - according to a poll commissioned by this channel, Biden is ahead of Trump by as much as 16 points.
Having mastered his new position, Chris Sillitz, commenting on the poll data, argues that this dramatic lag, combined with a minimal number of undecided voters, is an almost insurmountable obstacle on the way to Trump's re-election.
And he clarifies: the worst news for Trump is just a small percentage of undecided voters, since only this reserve can allegedly be counted on by the current president.
“Nine out of ten voters (90%) said they had finally decided which candidate they would vote for this fall.
Only 8% said they could change their mind, and 1% (who are these people?) Said that they have no preferences for candidates yet, ”Sillica writes.
Let us leave it on his conscience that Sillica lost a whole percentage of voters somewhere (although, for a minute, this is more than 1.5 million people).
But perhaps the CNN columnist doesn't need to know mathematics; it is enough to follow the party line correctly.
For now, let's just remember the figure - 10% of voters have not yet decided on their choice.
I'll explain why this is important later on.
“Four years ago, Trump proved that almost anything is possible.
But 2020 is not 2016, ”Sillica writes with ill-concealed gloating.
It can be understood - no one likes to remember their professional disgrace.
To tell the truth, then, four years ago, he was not alone.
Just before the election, the prediction site Hypermind predicted that Clinton would defeat Trump with a 74% probability.
The Predictit website (a kind of Forex exchange for political events) gave Hillary a 79% victory and estimated her likely advantage at 323 electoral votes against Trump's 215.
A poll by The New York Times predicted an 84% chance of Clinton winning, while Predictwise Crowth Wisdom estimated her chance of winning at 89%.
However, everyone was surpassed by the Princeton Electoral Consortium, according to which Hillary won the race with a 99% probability!
November 8, 2016 became a "day of sociological disgrace" for the overwhelming majority of liberal media, experts, specialized institutions and poll aggregators.
However, not for everyone!
There were also "dissidents" who predicted Trump's victory by taking into account data that others did not pay attention to.
The most famous of these "dissidents" was the Georgia-based consulting firm Trafalgar Group, which was named the best electoral firm in the 2016 presidential race after the election.
In particular, Trafalgar Group accurately predicted that Trump would win Pennsylvania and Michigan, and immediately on the eve of the elections showed Trump's advantage in the key state of Florida and in Georgia itself.
The second "dissident" was the American-British Democracy Institute (Washington - London).
This institution became widely known in the summer of 2016, since it was almost the only one that correctly predicted the victory of supporters of Britain's exit from the EU in the Brexit referendum.
Director of the Democracy Institute Patrick Bradshaw, based on the results of a poll conducted from November 3 to 6, said that Trump is confidently bypassing Hillary Clinton (50 points against 45).
Bradshaw noted that an unusually large number of undecided voters (10%) could decide the outcome of these elections, and suggested that the more likely option would be to support these undecided Trump, as a result of which the gap between him and Hillary would widen.
Now is the time to remember the bad mathematician (and even worse predictor) Chris Sillitz, with his "small percentage of undecided voters."
This "small percentage" is still the same 10% that Bradshaw in 2016 considered "an unusually large number."
In fact, there are about the same number of undecided voters now as there were before the previous elections.
But this is not the most interesting thing.
Both "sociological dissidents" who correctly predicted Trump's victory four years ago are predicting it now!
True, according to Trafalgar Group, the gap between Trump and Biden will not be large enough to guarantee this victory anyway.
Trafalgar experts suggest that Trump will receive 275 electoral votes, while Biden - 263. That is, Biden needs only seven more votes to turn the tide in his favor, and Trump needs to lose six votes to lose.
The Democracy Institute's forecasts provide an even more interesting picture.
According to a September poll, Trump is 1% ahead of Biden (46% versus 45%) - a very precarious advantage.
At the same time, Trump, according to the Institute, leads the fluctuating states (Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), ahead of the rival by an average of four points (47% versus 43%).
And if that leadership continues, then despite a very small national advantage, Trump will receive 320 electoral votes, while Biden is only 218.
Where did such a colossal discrepancy in forecasts come from, which, it seems, are carried out at the same time in the same country?
There are many reasons for this, and some of them already played a role in 2016, when, in the words of ZeroHedge, the entire "polling industry was crushed by its collective incompetence."
One can only wonder why the bitter experience of that autumn was not taken into account on the eve of the current elections.
First, both the Trafalgar Group and the Democracy Institute took into account in their models the votes of "shy voters" - those Americans who are going to vote for Trump, but are afraid to say so, fearing conflict with family, friends or neighbors.
In the face of open harassment, which supporters of the president are subjected to in the United States, confessing sympathy for Trump can even be life-threatening. ").
That is why, for example, polls that use indirect questions - for example, "who do you think your neighbors will vote for?"
- give completely different results.
For example, a Fox News poll conducted October 3-6 found that 38% of neighbors would vote for Biden, while 49% would vote for Trump.
Secondly, in an effort to hammer into the voter's heads that Trump has lost anyway, and Biden has already won in any case, Democrats and the liberal media associated with them are engaged in adjusting sociological models to the result they want.
For example, sociologist John Zogby, head of the private sociological service John Zogby Strategies, speaks about this directly.
"Some of the published polls giving Biden a 16 point lead give me concern," says Zogby.
Polls on CNN and other mainstream media, he believes, are based on samples of too many Democrats and too few Republicans.
"I myself am a Democrat," Zogby told reporters, "I just think the sample is not accurate."
According to Zogby, there is no 16-point gap between Trump and Biden, the real gap is two points (49% for Biden, 47% for Trump).
The question remains - why does the liberal media continue to insist so stubbornly that Biden's leadership does not leave Trump any chance.
The answer suggests itself: the liberal media is trying to rig the elections even before the November 3 vote and suppress the spirit of the Republicans, flaunting the allegedly rapid rise in Biden's popularity (which in fact does not exist).
In 2016, such a strategy has already led to a grandiose collapse of all hopes of Hillary Clinton's supporters.
And the data from the Trafalgar Group and the Democracy Institute unequivocally hint that in 2020, liberals may again find themselves at a broken trough.
True, Chris Sillica assures that this time everything will be different.
But we already know the price of his “predictions”.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.