Pollster Nik Nanos.The Globe and Mail
Nik Nanos is The Globe and Mail's pollster and chairman of Nanos Research.
Depending on one's political stripe it is either the torment of a Trump presidency or the bane of another Clinton president. A look at the polling in the United States suggests these politically turbulent times will lead to a fluctuation in the preferences and views of Americans. But the reality is that the U.S. electoral college should be more of a focus than the surveys which measure the popularity of presidential hopefuls.
An overlooked piece of presidential election trivia is that in the controversial 2000 election showdown between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Mr. Gore won the popular vote 48.4 per cent to Mr. Bush's 47.9 per cent. However, Mr. Bush won the U.S. electoral college battle 271 votes to Mr. Gore's 266 votes. Mr. Bush had a better distribution of votes, grabbing a series of winner-take-all states – most famously Florida. If the election outcome was decided by voters and popular sentiment, Mr. Gore would have been the 43rd president of the United States.
What should we expect?
Just last week, top thinkers on Canada-U.S. relations gathered at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State University for the U.S.-Canada Sage Summit. Presenters included Bruce Heyman, U.S. Ambassador to Canada, former Michigan governor (D) and U.S. ambassador to Canada James Blanchard, and Matt Borges, Ohio Republican Party chairman. The comments from Mr. Blanchard, now an adviser for the Clinton campaign, and from Mr. Borges, were particularly illuminating.
For Mr. Blanchard, in his estimation Ms. Clinton has a base of more than 200 U.S. electoral college votes compared with a little over 100 for Mr. Trump. Two hundred and seventy votes are needed to become president. From his viewpoint, the polls could fluctuate and even show a particularly close race, but the Clinton Democrat advantage in the U.S. electoral college meant that it would take only a few swing states to put Ms. Clinton in the White House.
In contrast, Mr. Borges, albeit a staunch supporter of Ohio Governor and recent Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich, was more circumspect in his analysis of the political environment and Republican Party fortunes. It was clear in his remarks that he was waiting to see if Mr. Trump would shift to be more in line with mainstream Republicans. Another piece of trivia is that a Republican has never in the history of the U.S. become president without winning Ohio.
Perhaps the best piece of advice is to take note but not to clutch to your chest every survey of popular sentiment reported in the news.
So expect swings in the polling numbers and the American punditry to be in overdrive – however, it's the electoral college vote that counts. Perhaps 2000 won't be the only year where one candidate wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college.