A noted American political pundit once said that using nationwide polls as a predictor of presidential elections was like trying to measure the wealth of Warren Buffet by counting up the value of the suits in his wardrobe. Since the electoral college – a system where candidates earn points for each state weighted by population – is what decides the presidency surely it is only local polls that really matter?
If this is the case a recent Quinnipac survey is bad news for Team Hillary. According to the results, despite Clinton’s double-digit lead in national polls, she is in a dead heat with Donald Trump in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. The size of these states means they carry heavy clout in the electoral college. No candidate since 1960 has made it to the White House without winning two out of the three.
But this assumes that the United States is still a place of safe red and blue states with a handful of big swing states making the difference. Look a little closer, however, and there is evidence the old logic is not holding.
Last week Clinton recorded a statistical tie with Trump in polls in the southern state of Georgia. Last month another poll put the two candidates neck and neck in Mississippi. As Trump has surged ahead in the primaries his fellow Republicans (if that is not too strong a phrase) have fallen behind in down-ticket races. As a result the Democrats are now eyeing Senate seats south of the Mason-Dixon line in states where they never expected to be competitive, like Arizona, Arkansas and North Carolina. There is increasingly confident talk of the Democrats winning back the Upper House. Republicans already have their work cut out for them – they hold 24 out of the 34 Senate seats that are up for election this time, seven of which in states that went blue in 2008 and 2012. And of course the more time and money Trump has to spend taking care of previously safe Republican territory the less he can spend in battleground states.
‘Shock polls’ like those in Mississippi and Georgia should, of course, be read with caution, especially this far out from the election. But it has been 40 years since a Democratic candidate won in Mississippi and Barack Obama lost Georgia by more than 200,000 votes both times he ran for the White House. These results indicate an electoral map that – if not quite turned upside down – seems to be all shook up.
Race, of course, is a factor (the Mississippi poll had Clinton winning 93 per cent of African American voters in the state) but the gender gap is clearly an important part of this realignment. The Quinnipac poll showed Clinton 19 points up among female voters in Pennsylvania and 13 points ahead with the same group in Florida. Trump, meanwhile, recorded equivalent double-digit leads in the other direction. Inevitably this gender split means voters crossing party lines, for example Clinton won 15 per cent of the vote from white Republican women in the Mississippi poll. This shaking up of the political map may make terms like ‘swing’ states and ‘safe’ states redundant. More likely these polls are sketching out the latest shifting of demographic coalitions that have long been a feature of electoral politics in a country as large and diverse as the United States.
In truth, political obsessives enjoy playing up the importance of electoral college maths just as much as they enjoyed playing up the possibility of a contested Republican convention – in fact the outcomes look set to be more mundane. Harry Enten over at FiveThirtyEight points out that the winner of the electoral college is almost always the candidate who wins the popular vote (there are only three times since 1828 when this has not been the case). This means the presidential candidate who can build a coalition of voters across party lines and can shake up traditional regional loyalties is likely to be the one who also does the best come November. So far it seems clear who she might be.
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Charlie Samuda is a former adviser to the Labour party and is studying at the Harvard Kennedy School. He tweets @CharlieSamuda
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