Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.
The US presidential election is on November 5. In Nate Silver’s aggregate of US national polls, Kamala Harris has a 49.0-46.3 lead over Donald Trump (49.2-46.2 in my previous US election article for The Conversation on Monday). In presidential elections, the Electoral College is decisive, not the national popular vote. Harris has at least a one-point lead in enough states to win the Electoral College by a 276-262 margin.
In Silver’s model, Harris has a 55% chance to win the Electoral College, up from 54% on Monday. She has been the favourite since last Friday after falling to a 35% win probability on September 9. Previously there had been a large gap between Silver’s and FiveThirtyEight’s models, with Harris favoured more at FiveThirtyEight. But this gap has nearly vanished, with Harris now a 56% win probability at FiveThirtyEight.
Monday’s Conversation article also covered elections for the US House of Representatives and Senate that will be held concurrently with the presidential election. If Harris wins, Democrats have a good chance to regain control of the House, but Republicans are likely to gain Senate control. Democrats are defending seats in three states Trump won easily in 2016 and 2020 and the Senate system favours Republicans owing to two senators per state.
Canada looking bleak for Liberals
Two Canadian federal by-elections occurred on September 16. In LaSalle-Émard-Verdun in Quebec, 91 candidates stood as a protest against first-past-the-post, with most receiving very few votes. The left-wing separatist Quebec Bloc gained from the centre-left Liberals, winning by 28.0-27.2 with 26.1% for the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) and 11.6% for the Conservatives. At the 2021 federal election, results in this seat were 42.9% Liberal, 22.1% Quebec Bloc, 19.4% NDP and 7.5% Conservatives.
At the by-election in Elmwood-Transcona in Manitoba, the NDP retained against the Conservatives, but by a much reduced margin. The NDP defeated the Conservatives by 48.1-44.1 with 4.8% for the Liberals. In 2021, the NDP won this seat by 49.7-28.1 with 14.7% for the Liberals.
The next Canadian federal election is due by October 2025. FPTP will be used to elect all 343 seats, with 172 needed for a majority. The CBC poll tracker gives the Conservatives 42.9%, the Liberals 24.1%, the NDP 17.6% and the Quebec Bloc 7.8% (33.5% in Quebec). This would be a Conservative landslide with the seat projection giving them 218 seats, the Liberals 63, the Quebec Bloc 39 and the NDP 21. The Liberals have governed since they won the October 2015 election, though they were reduced to a minority government after the 2019 election.
UK, France, Germany and Sri Lanka
In my previous article in early September, I covered the lack of a honeymoon for UK Labour and PM Keir Starmer after winning the July 4 general election. In an Opinium poll taken last week, Starmer’s net approval had plunged 45 points since the first post-election Opinium poll in mid-July. His net approval is now -26, one point lower than for former Conservative PM Rishi Sunak.
At snap French parliamentary elections in early July, the left-wing NFP alliance won 180 of the 577 seats, President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble 159, the far-right National Rally and allies 142 and the conservative Republicans 39. On September 5, Macron appointed the conservative Michel Barnier as his new PM. Last Saturday, Barnier and Macron announced a new cabinet composed of mostly conservative ministers. The NFP is hostile to the new government, so its survival depends on National Rally abstaining on confidence motions.
I previously covered September 1 German state elections in Thuringia and Saxony where the far-right AfD made gains. At last Sunday’s state election in Brandenburg, the centre-left SPD won 32 of the 88 seats (up seven since 2019), the AfD 30 (up seven), the economically left but socially conservative BSW 14 (new) and the conservative CDU 12 (down three). The Greens and Left had won ten seats each in 2019, but were wiped out as neither cleared the 5% threshold.
At last Saturday’s Sri Lankan presidential election, the socialist candidate of the National People’s Power party defeated the establishment candidate by 55.9-44.1 after preferences. The NPP had won just 3.2% in 2019.