US: There are no predictions

Three weeks before the US presidential elections, several of the main analysts declare themselves unable to predict who will be the winning candidate on November 5. “We are missing our crystal ball,” complained Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, which has been publishing a weekly report called “Crystal Ball” for years, dedicated to the analysis of policies and trends. He is not the only one. With the polls stuck in a tie within the margins of error, none of them seems to stand out. “Those looking for clear signals about how this election will go, including us, will probably be disappointed,” he noted. The fact is that analysts and specialized media are resorting to increasingly bizarre, or superficial, theories to try to determine the likely winner of the election. Some predict the victory of Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, based on more or less logical formulas, but full of subjective judgments. Others predict that the signals of popular culture lean strongly towards Harris: for example, the open support of the singer Taylor Swift, who has broken popularity records among women and young people, or that of the veteran singer Bruce Springsteen. It is also assured that Trump has an advantage thanks to the appeal of his economic positions, especially for minority groups, and in contrast to the perceived weakness of the economy under the current Democratic government. It may be, as some believe, that the variations in the polls and the current relative superiority of Trump and the equally relative disadvantage of Harris are a cyclical moment. The panorama is dominated by the increasingly strange interventions of Trump, who, in order to feed the fears of the Democrats, has a reputation for having a better real performance than the one indicated in the polls. But also, according to Republican analyst Shermichael Singleton, because he fell into Harris’ trap and allowed himself to be provoked.

Nota publicada originalmente en El Heraldo de México