This time around, I didn’t wait for the election to be called. On the morning of June 24, I stayed up until the numbers of votes to be declared was less than the margin at the time. This morning, I watched the results on a county-by-county level for states like Virginia – which did veer to Clinton at the end, I could see that Clinton’s Democratic “firewall” wasn’t as solid as people were predicting. Pennsylvania was the same on a county-by-county level; even prior to full reporting, it was obvious that Trump was more popular than the polls had anticipated.
So, once again, the polling agencies have to question themselves. While many states were within the usual margin of error of polls, that the bigger errors were typically in the same direction (towards Trump) once again reveals that there are some structural issues about the performance of the opinion polls and how the polling companies capture difficult to reach voters. An even trickier issue is understanding those who lie to pollsters about their voting intentions [or, to be more generous, change their mind at the last moment] for reasons of social acceptability.
At this stage, with 31 electoral college votes still available, but with only 3 states left to declare, Trump has exceeded the required 270 electoral college votes to win [even without Washington state’s faithless elector]; but with 99% reporting, according to AP, the current state of the popular vote is:
|
99% reporting
|
Votes
|
|---|---|
 Donald Trump
Republican Party
|
47%
59,521,401
|
 Hillary Clinton
Democratic Party
|
48%
59,755,284
|
 Gary Johnson
Libertarian Party
|
3%
4,050,927
|
 Jill Stein
Green Party
|
1%
1,210,290
|
| Other candidates |
0.7%
798,952
|
Spoiler Alert?
Were any states sufficiently close as to be influenced by potential “lower order” candidates. Well, yes, quite a few, but most were votes for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate – which are perhaps more likely to break towards Trump (or, more likely, not voted).
What happens if we consider Jill Stein’s voters. Suppose that she hadn’t been running, and, instead, her voters split 50/50 for Clinton [leftish] and Johnson [challenger / alternative party]
Michigan’s 16 electoral college votes [as of the current reported state of play] would be firmly in Clinton’s column, but no other states would have swung.
If, instead, the split had been 75/25 for Clinton [leftish] and Johnson [challenger / alternative party], then still only Michigan would have been in play for Clinton.
So, the splitting of the left wing vote may have cost Clinton Michigan [subject to the final votes being counted], it cannot be blamed on her losing the Electoral College.
Notes: data obtained via the AP feed (as google reports it) and via http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/president
The CNN website is particularly useful as it gives the county-by-county breakdown across (almost) all states, rather than requiring you to go to individual states webpages.
ps: I have a student who is looking at the relationship between socio-demographic variables and the primary voting patterns in a selection of US states on a county level (or town where appropriate). It will be interesting to see if anything crops up by applying similar analysis to the general election results to see if there were obvious trends [or if it is just a spatial thing] that had been overlooked during the campaign period. But that is definitely work for another day, as she has until the end of the second semester to complete her work!
To be decided 