Has there ever been a more compelling and controversial election than the one we are seeing in the race for the White House at the moment?
The Republican Party are being represented by Donald Trump, the billionaire property mogul and reality TV star, while the Democrats have a former First Lady, Secretary of State and Senator, Hillary Clinton, on the ballot.
Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up – the most powerful office in the world being contested by a woman who was in the Situation Room when they took down Osama bin Laden against a man who has been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame having clotheslined Vince McMahon.
And yet it’s a race that’s virtually too close to call.
Only in America!
You get the feeling whoever emerges triumphant after the polls have closed in the States on Tuesday, it will be perceived that they didn’t lose, rather than they won, with both campaigns being marred by serious issues.
Throughout her campaign, Hillary has undergone an FBI investigation for her use of a private email server from 2009 to 2013, during her time as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Then, after it appeared the investigation was closed, it came roaring back into focus due to more emails being discovered on a device belonging to a Clinton advisor’s husband, Anthony Weiner. Weiner’s device was seized due to investigations into him having ‘sexted’ a minor.
While Clinton has since been cleared again of any criminality, it allowed Trump to make serious hay over the past few weeks, declaring the investigation was “bigger than Watergate”. Naturally, it was called ‘Weinergate’.
As for Trump, he has had his own issues with alleged sexual impropriety, with footage emerging from 2005 in which The Donald engages in some “locker-room talk” – saying indefensible things about the way he treats women.
Honestly, it wouldn’t be a great surprise for one more rabbit to pop out of the hat before this election is over, once again throwing all predictions out the window.
But until that bunny emerges, there appears to be a few decent indicators as to who the next Commander in Chief will be.
Search and social
If the election were to be decided purely on a search and social basis, the GOP’s candidate would have this thing sewn up.
Over the past 90 days, Google reveals searches for Trump almost double that of searches for Clinton, indicating the political map of the USA is entirely Trump dominated, showing the Republican is the most searched for politician in all 50 states.
Of course, there’s a big difference between being popular online and people wanting you to be the leader of the free world. Interestingly, Trump’s top two rising related queries are ‘billy bush trump’ and ‘billy bush’ (Billy Bush being the TV personality Trump engaged in the aforementioned “locker-room talk”), while Hillary’s No.1 rising query is ‘between two ferns’, the mock interview she did with comedian Zach Galifianakis.
Really, this just tells us that Trump and his antics are far more searchable than Hillary’s, which isn’t a great indicator of electability.
If Facebook likes equated to votes, Trump would again be in the lead, with his official page having 12,079,135 likes compared to Hillary’s 8,008,645. But this is flawed too, firstly because anyone can ‘like’ a page – whether they’re a registered US voter or not – and secondly because Trump is listed as a ‘Public Figure’, compared to Clinton who is a ‘Politician’, having built a large chunk of his social presence as a celebrity, which is far cooler to ‘like’ than a pollie.
Still, with candidates spending an estimated $1 billion each on social this campaign, compared to just $159 million for the 2012 race, Trump’s extra four million Facebook followers are a huge boon.
The bookies
Local bookmakers are pretty firmly of the belief that America will have its first ever female President sworn in on January 20, 2017.
Luxbet have Clinton at $1.32 compared to Trump at $3.30, Sportsbet are giving Hillary at $1.28 to Trump’s $3.40, and William Hill put Hillary at $1.27 to The Donald’s $3.80.
Done and dusted then? Not quite.
You can’t necessarily rely on the bookies to predict an election – indeed, the bookies in Britain said that Brexit wouldn’t go ahead, even though the polls indicated that it would, and we all know how that ended up.
As former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research
Michael Traugott told CNBC, markets can be manipulated, while polls take in a broad spectrum of the population.
"Its the difference between, first of all, mass opinion and elite opinion," said Traugott.
"The best [estimates] come from the data aggregators because they take information and combine it from multiple polls, which is a way of reducing chance and other kinds of variations."
So what do the polls say?
At this stage, the polls have Hillary ahead, although it’s nowhere near as broad a margin as the bookmakers would have you believe.
Pollster Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight (and takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college, which determines who becomes President) has Clinton with 45.1% compared to Trump’s 42.3%, and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson with 4.4%.
But despite Hillary having the lead, Trump has the momentum, rallying from an almost seven-point gap in mid-October as the fallout of his “Grab ’em by the pussy” comments reached its zenith, to being less than three points down with two days to go.
While a win’s a win, whether it’s by a landslide or a single vote, three points in polling is hardly a definitive predictor. As Nate Cohn wrote for the New York Times, “A three-point lead is enough to make Mrs. Clinton a clear favorite, but it’s not a particularly strong advantage.”
Keys to the White House
Another method for predicting the winner that’s worth mentioning is the Keys to the White House, developed by American historian Allan Lichtman and Russian scientist Vladimir Keilis-Borok, based largely on research into earthquakes.
Rather than assessing the candidate and their performance, the Keys system is based on the state of the nation over the past four years. If things have gone well, the incumbent party will hold the Presidency, if it’s been a bad four years, the challenging party will take the win.
Specifically, there are 13 true or false questions – the ‘Keys’ – such as if there was any social unrest or scandal under the sitting administration. If five or fewer are answered in the negative, the incumbent party wins. If six or more are answered in the positive, the challenging party wins.
The reason it’s worth bringing up this method is because of its stunning success rate: the Keys retrospectively predicted every election from 1860 to 1980 (the system having been first developed in 1981) and have nailed the eight Presidential elections between 1984 and 2012.
So who does Lichtman say will be the 45th President of the United States of America?
Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump’s severe and unprecedented problems bragging about sexual assault and then having ten or more women coming out and saying, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what you did’ — this is without precedent. But it didn’t change a key,” Lichtman told the Washington Post.
“By the narrowest of possible margins, the keys still point to a Trump victory.”
However, in that same interview, Lichtman acknowledged that 2016’s was set to be an election like no other:
“I do think this election has the potential to shatter the normal boundaries of American politics and reset everything, including, perhaps, reset the keys to the White House.”