A lot can change in the final stages of the US presidential election.
For example, in 2016, Donald Trump gained enough support late in the campaign from undecided voters in battleground states to propel him to the presidency. Another example is the pre-election disclosure A drunk driving arrest a few years earlier in 2000 may have cost George W. Bush his popular vote victory.
In light of these and other lessons from past presidential elections, let's offer a few reminders about what might be in the spotlight in an election. Last day of campaign. Of course, not all of these anticipated developments will materialize. But if the past is any guide, we might do it. Some people already have it.
• speculation Regarding surprises in October or NovemberThis is an unexpected and potentially devastating development that will have an explosive impact on the entire political landscape. President Bush's drunk driving incident announced by a television reporter It was certainly a surprise that the election was held in Maine five days before the election. President Bush Advisor Karl Rove thought This disclosure prevented President Bush from endorsing states that would have secured him a popular vote and Electoral College victory. In fact, the 2000 election revolved around a long-running dispute over who was in charge of Florida. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush..
more recent october surprise It was the FBI. announcementannounced just 11 days before the 2016 election that it would reopen an investigation into the private email server used by Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. Clinton later said that the new FBI investigationdetermining factors” and lost to Trump.
• persistent discussion About the campaign great known unknownpolling agencies effectively fixed We adapted their methodology to accurately measure support for President Trump in this year's survey. Opinion polls in 2016 and 2020 underestimated his support, resulting in successive declines in approval ratings. embarrassment of voting.
Some pollsters thought the adjustments made after the 2016 election would be a positive in 2020, but that wasn't the case. The overall results of the public opinion poll four years ago were Worst in 40 years. If the poll results are low, as they were in 2020, Trump could be in a good position to win re-election.
The knowns and unknowns of the polls will not be resolved until after the election. Still, it has become a major topic among people. pollster and critic For many months.
• guess Regarding unexpected outcomes at the state level, such as Trump's victory. virginia. or minnesota. or texas It fell to the Democratic Party. It seems like every presidential election generates such speculation, but it often doesn't come to fruition.
For example, in 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney I felt an opportunity Two days before the election, he campaigned in the suburbs of Philadelphia to cover Pennsylvania. Mr. Romney's hopes turned out to be illusory. He lost the national vote to Barack Obama by almost 4 percentage points. He lost Pennsylvania by five points.
• scattered storiesHowever unlikely, About landslide Even though polls consistently suggest a close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, and the last presidential election landslide was 40 years ago.
Film director Michael Moore wrote this about his film in early October: Sense of “intuition” Kamala Harris will beat President Trump by 13 percentage points. Moore added that the “only way” to ensure Trump's “permanent removal from the public eye” is in a catastrophic landslide. “We shouldn't settle for anything more.”
Around the same time, Dick Morris, who served as an advisor to former President Bill Clinton, guessed Trump will win if he loses. “Landslides take time to occur, and they may not become apparent until weeks before an election,” Morris wrote. “The same goes for the Trump-Harris race.”
Morris wrote that a plausible analogy for the 2024 election is the surprise outcome of 1980, when Republican President Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in a crushing defeat that pollsters had not expected. In fact, most Late campaign voting in 1980 A close election was expected. Reagan won by nearly 10 points.
• outlier public opinion poll It reports findings that are so improbable as to invite ridicule. Ann Outlier poll The results are puzzling and miss the point, stemming from flaws such as sampling error and bias built into the pollsters' methods. house effect. A memorable outlier was a 2020 Washington Post/ABC News late election poll in Wisconsin in which Joe Biden 17 point difference In the state. Biden won Wisconsin by less than a point.
“Once in a blue moon, you see a poll that makes you blink twice to make sure you're not seeing something.” the poll analyst wroteadded that the Post/ABC poll was “just that kind of poll.”
• Pretend to be a newsworthy polllike “”cookie voteSuch efforts suggest a clever and interesting side to polling, but they are by no means scientific. Or reliable.
The “cookie vote” quietly began during the 2008 election campaign. In 2020, the poll received unprecedented attention after President Trump's son Eric visited the bakery. During the campaign, the bakery sold nearly 32,000 cookies with Donald Trump's name on them and 5,750 cookies with Biden's name on them, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. . Biden won Pennsylvania by less than 2 percentage points, confirming that the polls offer little more than quirky entertainment value.
“Let me tell you this is not scientific,” the bakery's owner, Kathleen Rochel, told the Inquirer. “This is a cookie with someone's name on it.”
As Election Day approaches, we'll soon find out for whom the cookie will crumble in 2024.
W. Joseph Campbell Professor Emeritus at American University in Washington, DC, and author of the following books: 7 books Recently, “Losing in Gallup: Voting failure in US presidential election” His handle on X is @wjosephcampbell.
