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During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry has covered innumerable votes (indeed his first television interview was with a Welsh MP during the 1987 campaign), so looks with fascination at the US election which will be held tomorrow, where polls have been predicting Kamala Harris ahead, Donald Trump as the victor, or a dead heat.
It’s normally all over by now bar the shouting (and there has been a lot of that!).
This time, however, you just don’t know.
In the US Presidential Election some polls put Kamala Harris just ahead, some say Donald Trump will be victorious tomorrow, and some declare that it will be tied.
For example in one national poll on Friday which looked at the average for each candidate, accounting for how recent was the survey, the sample size and methodology, the results were 48.1 per cent to Ms Harris and 46.7 per cent to Mr Trump.
Meanwhile in critical swing states, which could determine the election outcome, the competition is even tighter, and in some Mr Trump is predicted to win the vote.
Key battleground states include Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia (despite what happened there), Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada.
FiveThirtyEight’s daily poll tracker indicated on Friday that Ms Harris’s lead in Michigan remained slight, at approximately 0.8 points.
However, she has lost her lead in Nevada, where Mr Trump led by 0.3 points.
In Wisconsin, her lead dropped to 0.6 points on Friday, down from 0.8 points last Wednesday.
On the other hand, Mr Trump’s advantage in Pennsylvania has increased slightly, rising from 0.4 points to 0.7 points.
Going into this weekend his lead in North Carolina returned to the previous week’s levels, at 1.4 points.
Mr Trump also gained ground in Arizona, where he led Ms Harris by 2.4 points, and in Georgia (unbelievably!), where his advantage was 1.8 points.
A YouGov poll on Saturday for The Times showed Ms Harris narrowly ahead in some of those states, and Carl Bialik, Vice-President of data science at YouGov declared: “it’s a nail-biter”.
The BBC declared yesterday: “Right now the leads in the swing states are so small that it’s impossible to know who is really ahead from looking at the polling averages”.
Another poll at the weekend appeared to give hope to Democrats but they remain nervous.
Ms Harris had a three-point lead in the midwestern state of Iowa, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll of 808 likely voters, it showed the Vice President (VP) leading Mr Trump 47 per cent to 44 per cent.
But Democrats know that he took the state easily in both 2016 and 2020, so they are cautious.
The Economist has warned: “It’s probably a fluke”, and, because the sample size is so small: “Democrats should not celebrate too soon”.
In other words – NOBODY KNOWS!
These are wafer thin margins (or the samples are tiny), and the problems are compounded by the fact that polls have been wrong before, so it is worth looking at what happened in the recent UK General Election (GE).
Around 17 voting-intention polls were conducted immediately before GE day in July, and they suggested that Labour would enjoy an 18-percentage-point lead over the Conservatives.
In fact once the ballots had been counted, Labour’s share of the vote was just 10.3 points ahead of the Tories’.
This was the biggest miss since the GE in 1992.
As the GE was described in the media with the words that it was “a staging post in the far longer trek towards the next Senedd election in 2026″, we are likely to see many more polls in the months ahead, so it seems reasonable to ask: ‘HOW VALUABLE ARE THEY?!’.
A poll in Wales a month before the election was reported in this way: “The Conservatives look set to lose all but one seat in Wales (they actually lost all of them) in the upcoming General Election, according to an exclusive ITV Cymru Wales poll.
“The latest seat projections reveal Labour are heading for a landslide victory for seats in Wales, with Plaid Cymru on track to win two, perhaps three, seats in July (in fact they won FOUR).
“Whether the Liberal Democrats will end their absence on the Westminster stage in Wales remains too close to call (they did).”
The report added: “The Barn Cymru poll, conducted by YouGov, suggested that 45% of people in Wales would vote for Labour in the upcoming General Election, up three points from our previous poll in December (their vote share of 37 per cent, was in fact DOWN 3.9 points from last time)…”.
So it is wise not to trust these polls – just look at the actual one tomorrow, and cross your fingers that Mr Trump will accept the result if he loses.
Unlike last time…
Some of the political stories Phil has covered over the years, as he was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
After the result he will analyse it, and look at how correct were the polls.
Tomorrow – ‘More water, water everywhere…’ and how shock news that the water regulator could face the axe so the UK and Welsh Governments are organising a commission to consider abolition, have highlighted earlier controversies.
