By Zoisa Fraser in Ohio
With five days to go before the gripping US 2016 elections, there is no clear indication as to who will win Ohio, a key battleground state and Ohio State University (OSU) Professor of Constitutional Law, Daniel Tokaji yesterday expressed surprise that Republican candidate Donald Trump has managed to rake in almost as much support as Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ candidate.
The latest polls show Trump following closely behind Clinton in Ohio which is usually key to determining who wins the presidential election.
“I was initially surprised that he did so well in the Republican Primary and I suppose less surprised by his maybe greater than generally expected success in the general elections because we are so polarized”, Tokaji told a group of 25 journalists from around the world participating in the Ohio Election Night Tour which began yesterday and ends next Wednesday. Stabroek News is one of two Caribbean media houses chosen to participate in the tour organized by the US Department of State, Foreign Press Centre.
During his presentation he described the election as “odd” and was later asked by Stabroek News to elaborate.
He said that it is very difficult to persuade the vast majority of Republican voters to vote for a Democrat and vice versa. He explained that elections are about persuading this “very narrow slice of swing voters…to vote for your candidate and getting your committed supporters out” and later pointed out that he has no idea who is going to win the elections.
On the issue of the recent polls, he said that they are not necessarily reliable. “But if you take them all together then especially if you are able to weight (them) you can get a pretty good estimate of where things stand. Anyone who tells you they know for certain how this elections is going to be resolved ….with 100 percent certainty I would be suspicious of those claims”, he said.
Paul Beck, Ohio State University Professor Emeritus of Political Science also expressed the view that the results of polls are unreliable and should not be used as an instrument to predict the winner. “The important thing to realize is that polls are a snapshot…One of the problems that all the pollsters have is getting people to respond to the polls”, he said, adding that the response rate is very low and this would not in the end make an accurate prediction. He said that some people lie too.
He added that there are a number of reasons to be suspicious about the polls. “When you get down to a race that is very close ….the poll is not really gonna tell you who is going to win that race even if the poll is done on election day itself ….the best guideline…is to do a kinda minimum averaging”, he said, while noting that polling is a big industry that almost anyone can conduct. He expressed the view that the poll that really matters is the one done on elections day.
Asked to what extent the resurgence of the email scandal has damaged Clinton’s chances of winning, he responded that “it is hard to know…because these events don’t happen in isolation”, adding that at that time, there was also the Obama health insurance premiums issue which rose to the fore.
He said that eyes have to be kept on those Republican women who believe that Clinton may be just as bad and as such may vote for Trump or those who are torn between the two and eventually decide to just stay home.
Asked if Trump stands a good chance of winning, he responded in the affirmative and later pointed out that in order to do this he needs to win the battleground states. “The question is would he win most of them? There are some that he doesn’t appear as if he will win…’, he said. It was explained too that the states won is important as each has a different number of electors and a different weight in the electoral college. ‘The larger the population the more weight the state has’, he explained.
Ohio, he said, has the third highest number of electoral votes (18) in the key battleground states coming behind Florida and Pennsylvania. Right now Ohio ‘is too close to call”. He said that CNN’s projection and others have Ohio more in the “Trump. So Ohio really matters”. He said that in the past this state has gained great prominence for the media and the campaigns to pay attention to.
“If Trump wins Ohio he could still quite easily lose the elections in the electoral college because Ohio is sort of out of step with some of the battleground states”, he said.
Beck said that the general elections has been a problem for Clinton because she has been a part of the Democratic establishment for a long time. “Donald Trump has positioned himself as the outsider even during the campaign he has attacked candidates in his own party….saying that they are part of the establishment I am the change candidate, I am going to change that”, he said before explaining that many Americans are looking for change. “They want somebody who is going to be president who will change things”, he said.
He added that there are six key battleground states inclusive of Ohio where there is no clear indication as to who will win and that collectively they will have an impact on the final results.
