The last few weeks have not been especially kind to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Since her party’s national convention in July, Clinton has seen new questions emerge surrounding her email accounts, donations to the Clinton Foundation and even her personal health after a badly timed coughing fit over the Labour Day weekend.
Through it all, national poll numbers for the former Secretary of State have dropped steadily. From a solid eight-point lead in early August polling, many surveys now put her only slightly ahead of Republican nominee Donald Trump. Several others are showing the two in a dead heat.
CNN’s latest numbers, which made big headlines on Tuesday, have Trump out in front by a slim two-point margin.
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But how much do these numbers really matter as the presidential election enters its final stretch?
According to the experts, not much. Daniel Politi, a writer for news website Slate, went so far as to call the daily polls being churned out south of the border “pretty meaningless.”
“The fact that the polls are moving a point or two toward the Republicans, I don’t take all that too seriously,” agreed Barry Kay, an associate professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Kay pointed said the attention being paid to the CNN results showing Trump taking the lead may be chalked up to media bias.
“There’s a bias in the media to want to report on change, and if there isn’t a lot of change, to emphasize or even exaggerate change,” he said.
“The best way to interpret the national polls is to not get fixated on any one poll, but to look at the moving average of polls that have been conducted in the last seven to 10 days.”
Donald Abelson, professor and chair in the department of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, said there are also inherent problems with the polls themselves, including varying margins of error and methodologies.
“We know that many polls are unreliable. It’s not a perfect science,” Abelson said.
“In my view, the polls are important in reminding voters that this is a critically important election, that in all likelihood it’s going to result in a very close outcome and that it’s incumbent on them to exercise their democratic responsibility to vote.”
Voting for a voter, not a president
The bigger issue, both experts suggested, is that most national polls are measuring people’s individual preference. But Americans don’t vote for their president directly.
Instead, they vote for a representative (or elector) from their state who has already pledged their support to – in this case – either Trump or Clinton. In most states, if the majority of electors chosen are Democrats, the whole state votes blue. If they are mostly Republicans, it goes red. Winner takes all.
In total there are 538 electors in the U.S. Electoral College, and to win the White House you need 270 of them on your side.
Anyone who breaks down popular support in each state will soon see that Trump’s prospects are not nearly as rosy.
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If every state that has gone to the Democrats in the last six elections does so again, Clinton ends up with 242 electoral votes. Winning just one more big state, like Florida, would put her over 270 and send Trump packing.
The whole thing will therefore come down to the handful of ‘swing’ states that could still go either way on election night, and the undecided voters in those regions.
“The question becomes, which candidate in which battleground state is able to appeal to that swath of undecided voters?” Abelson said.
But Kay isn’t optimistic about Trump’s chances in the swing states, pointing out that he doesn’t have a consistent lead in any of them and his campaign is struggling to get itself organized on the ground. Physically getting people to the polls on election day can make the difference between victory and defeat, Kay noted.
But a major misstep by Clinton during the upcoming presidential debates, or even a series of terror attacks, could still upend the race.
“At the moment, I think things still look pretty comfortable for Hillary Clinton,” Kay said. “(But) I don’t want to suggest the election is over. It’s not.”
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