We should get a clear picture of the way the US election is going based on votes cast on election day, a US electoral expert says.
Professor Michael McDonald is an expert on early voting, and is running the US Elections Project - a turnout-tracking database run by University of Florida.
Florida is the state to watch, he told Kathryn Ryan.
Photo: 2020 Getty Images/AFP
Listen to the full interviews with Michael McDonald and G. Terry Madonna
“Many election officials will report early votes first, this will certainly happen in Florida where we’re expecting the first votes to be reported about half an hour after polls close, and they will favour Biden.
“Then we’re going to get the election day vote and that should break for Trump and that may swing the pendulum back to him.
“Then there will be mailed ballots that are returned to election officers on election day, those take more time for election officials to process. So, they may come in towards the end of the night and that may yet swing the pendulum back towards Biden.”
If Trump does not do well in that election day vote, that’s will be a clear signal he’s not going to win, Professor McDonald says.
Battle ground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania will take longer to declare as they don’t start counting mail in vote until today, he says.
Polls in those states were “gloriously wrong” in 2016, he says, but doesn’t expect the same thing to happen again.
“They didn’t have a lot of late polling that was quality in those states because people just thought that Clinton had a win there and so the pollsters didn’t want to spend their money on it.
“This time around they are not going to make the same mistake and they are polling heavily in those states, they changed their methodology to make sure they get the distribution of the electorate more correct than they did in 2016.”
There are other states likely to declare today that will also give a sense of the political mood in the US, he says.
“If Biden manages to win some states like Florida or Georgia or North Carolina, that pretty much means there is no way that Trump can win the electoral college.”
Trump needs to sweep those southern states, he says, and if he loses Florida he can’t win.
“It’s virtually impossible for him to win without Florida, Florida is key in the election and so are some other states as well …. But we should know who won Florida on election night.”
G. Terry Madonna is a professor and pollster at the popular Franklin and Marshall College Poll based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania, which went for Trump in 2016, remains crucial, he says.
It has 20 electoral college votes and Trump won by a whisker in 2016, Madonna says.
“Trump only won Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes, less than 1 percentage point.”
A majority of polls are giving Biden a 4 to 7 percent lead in the state this time, he says.
He also said mistakes made in 2016 by the pollsters won’t happen again.
“In 2016 we stopped our interviewing nine days before the election. Within that time a large percentage of voters made up their minds, or changed their minds, that’s the kind of volatility that existed and the majority of them went for Donald J Trump.”
Pollsters are also weighting by education this time round, he says.
“Donald Trump’s support base in a number of the battle ground states comes from white, working class voters with High School educations or less, Joe Biden’s support base right now tends to come from college-educated voters.
“So, when we do statistical adjustments this year most pollsters have weighted the polls by education.”
Approval ratings in Pennsylvania favour Biden, he says. In 2016 both candidates were more unpopular than popular.
“There isn’t any doubt that President Trump’s popularity is under water in Pennsylvania, I’ve not seen a single poll by the way that shows him more favourably viewed than not favourably viewed.
“Back in 2016 for the first time since we’ve had scientific polling both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were more unpopular than popular. That was the big difference.
“Right now, Joe Biden in most polls is slightly more popular than unpopular.”