‘Mega poll’ delivers bad news for Trump before election: report

LONDON: With just one day before voters head to the polls where they will choose between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump to lead the country for the next four years, a UK polling company noted for its high accuracy has some bad news for the former president.

According to a report from Politico, Harris will win according to Focaldata, which has deployed a proprietary method of compilation and analysis called “MRP” which has been highly successful in predicting British elections.

According to Politico’s Tim Ross and Emilio Casalicchio, “Combining the MRP results with their large-scale online swing state polling Focaldata assesses Harris is likely to take Michigan, with a lead of nearly 5 points, Nevada with a lead of about 2 points over Trump, and with a slight edge in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

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The Focaldata research suggests Trump just scraping past Harris in Georgia and North Carolina. The polling data and MRP modeling are split on Arizona.”

In an interview, James Kanagasooriam, Focaldata’s chief research officer, explained, “Our MRP model has shown a Trump win throughout the campaign and only in the final update has it nudged Democrat,” adding, “We are ‘lean Democrat’, but only by the barest of margins.”

The report notes that the methodology used by Focaldata in 2017, “… correctly predicted Prime Minister Theresa May would lose her majority in Parliament at a time when most polls suggested she would win big.”

The report notes that, “Backers of the method say it is likely to be even more effective in the U.S. where there are only 50 states. In Britain, the MRP model needs to produce forecasts for 650 constituencies represented in Westminster’s parliament, a more complicated operation.”