Harris' victory prognosed by British mega-poll - Politico
US presidential candidate Kamala Harris (photo: Getty Images)
The British company Focaldata conducted a poll using a new methodology that some say is the most accurate. Preliminarily, it predicts Kamala Harris will win the US presidential election, Politico reports.
The public opinion polling company has surveyed more than 31,000 voters across the United States over the past month. The survey was of an innovative type called MRP, which has become influential in the UK in recent years.
Combining the MRP results with large-scale online polling in swing states, Focaldata estimates that Harris is likely to win in Michigan by nearly 5%, in Nevada by about 2% over Donald Trump, and by small margins in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Focaldata's research suggests that Trump barely beat Harris in Georgia and North Carolina. Polling data and MRP modeling are split in Arizona.
Harris's advantage is partly due to her strong appeal to older white women, who have historically been a right-wing group. Trump won among young black and Hispanic men.
“Our MRP model has shown a Trump win throughout the campaign and only in the final update has it nudged Democrat,” said James Kanagasooriam, Focaldata’s chief research officer.
Although the results of the study point to a Democratic victory in Tuesday's election, researchers are still wary of attaching their flags to the flagpole.
“We are ‘lean Democrat’, but only by the barest of margins,” Kanagasooriam told Politico. “Even a polling error a third of the size seen in 2016 and 2020 would put Trump back in the White House.”
Politico clarified that MRP stands for “multilevel regression and post-stratification.” This means that it is a statistical model used by sociologists to estimate election results at the state level. To do this, a massive national sample is taken, and then the results at the regional or state level are estimated using demographic data.
This method, called “mega-polls,” emerged in the United Kingdom in 2017 when it correctly predicted that Prime Minister Theresa May would lose her majority in parliament, while most polls suggested she would win big.
US elections
The US presidential election will take place this Tuesday, November 5. The main contenders for the presidency are Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
According to the Times/YouGov poll, Harris is ahead of Trump in terms of support in four of the seven key or so-called swing states.
