US election results: How did opinion polls undercount Trump voters again?
Al Jazeera
It’s the third consecutive election in which opinion polls have underestimated Trump’s support.
Ahead of the United States presidential elections on Tuesday, public opinion polls had predicted a neck-and-neck race between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Yet eventually, Trump cruised to a comfortable victory, defying most polls. He has already won five of the seven swing states – Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin – and appears poised to win the remaining two, Arizona and Nevada. Most of these wins are by margins larger than the polls had forecast.
And, while most pollsters had predicted a narrowing margin between Harris and Trump in the popular vote, almost all showed Harris ahead. In the end, Trump is on course to not just win the popular vote – but to do so by a margin of close to 5 million votes. That’s a win no Republican can boast of since George HW Bush in 1988.
Overall, Trump has already won 295 Electoral College votes, comfortably more than the 270 needed to win, while Harris won 226. If he wins Arizona and Nevada as is predicted, Trump will end up with 312 Electoral College votes.
So how did the opinion polls go wrong – so wrong?
Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque recorded his journey on the long road from Amman to Baghdad.
Faced with reports that two US prosecutors have opened probes, the left-wing leader denies links to drug traffickers.
Indian textile workers are returning home after days without cooking gas, as an LPG crisis linked to the Iran war.
A former Supreme Court justice, Celso Gamboa was accused by the US of using government connections to traffic cocaine.
In an initial statement, the US military said three people survived the strike but only one survivor was ultimately recovered alive.
Oil and gas facilities in the Gulf have been attacked since early in the war on Iran.
Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio says he is open to negotiating with the US over trade, but refused to entertain a leadership shake-up.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake says request made on February 26, two days before US and Israel launched war on Iran.
A six-time karate champion and action film star, Norris was hospitalised in Hawaii on Thursday for unknown causes.
