Pictured Above: Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump in aggregate polling data by 10.7 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Courtesy of The White House
By Trevor Martindale
The presidential election is tomorrow and the majority of polls point to a Joe Biden victory over President Donald Trump.
FiveThirtyEight, a polling analysis website, aggregates polling data and repeatedly simulates potential outcomes for the presidential election in its ‘2020 Election Forecast.’
FiveThirtyEight’s forecast overwhelmingly favors a Biden victory, giving him an 89 percent chance of victory to Trump’s 11 percent.
Yet, students remain skeptical.
Kacy Cartmell, the former president of Turning Point USA, a conservative political club, believes the election is a tossup.
2016’s unexpected results have implored Cartmell to err on the side of caution when evaluating polling data.
“I still believe it can go either way,” Cartmell said. “As (the) last (presidential) election showed, the candidate who most people believed and the polls showed would have been elected did not.”
Junior biology major Caleb Crawford shares this sentiment.
“Look at what happened in 2016 when Hillary was leading (and) Trump still won,” Crawford said. “But who knows.”
Jennifer Barerra, the secretary of the College Democrats at USFSP, believes Biden is more likely to win, but encourages students to vote regardless of what the polls show.
“I believe that Joe Biden has a high chance of winning the election, because we have experienced a lot of tragedy in this country over the past four years of Trump’s presidency,” Barerra said. “(But) I don’t want to rely on the polls.”
Sophomore political science major Zach Axel believes polling methodology discounts Trump’s support.
“There is a large group of people termed the ‘silent majority’ which is conservatives in… key states that don’t participate in polls,” Axel said. “We live in an environment where there is a negative stigma (around) publicly supporting Trump.”
The final aggregate polling data of the 2016 presidential election saw Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 3.9 percent.
Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.1 percent.
As of Nov. 1, Biden leads Trump by 8.6 percent in aggregate polling data.
The Crow’s Nest will be releasing a pre-election special episode of ‘Crow’s Cast,’ where various staffers will make their election predictions. Visit and subscribe to ‘The Crow’s Nest at USFSP’ to stay updated on this special and all future episodes.
