US election: Data guru Bela Stantic says Donald Trump on track to win again

So, according to that analysis, the US is heading for an electoral map which looks something like this.

In other words, the race is close – pretty much neck-and-neck – but Trump is once again on course to lose the popular vote while winning the decisive electoral vote.

About 2.9 million more Americans cast ballots for Clinton than for Trump in 2016. However, Trump’s support was distributed more efficiently.

While the Democrat racked up huge margins in populous but uncompetitive states like California and New York, Trump managed to scrape to relatively narrow victories in the states that actually mattered, such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

That gave him a 304-227 edge in the Electoral College, comfortably above the winning threshold of 270.

Stantic said the 2020 election was, broadly speaking, the same sort of race.

“It’s really a coin toss. I think Florida, at the moment, is a coin toss, but Trump is just ahead,” he said.

But his draft analysis dug up one particularly important – and perhaps surprising – difference between 2016 and 2020.

“I find that this time it is more polarised than last time,” Stantic said.

He reached that conclusion by analysing the comments on Biden’s social media posts.

“People reacted so harshly against Biden. It was 30,000-something comments, and all strongly against him,” he said.

“They are saying that he cannot be trusted, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. ‘At least Trump, what he says, he thinks.’ Comments along these lines.

This is an interesting wrinkle, because the conventional wisdom you often hear from political experts – and occasionally, from self-important journalists – is that Clinton was a more polarising figure than Biden is.

Four years ago, Trump and Clinton both had unusually high disapproval ratings in the polls. This time, Biden’s favourability rating is pretty much split down the middle.

“I feel they hate him more than Hillary,” Stantic said.

He pointed out that, as potentially the first female president, Clinton could at least rely on enthusiastic support from women.

“Why would you vote for someone who has issues expressing himself, and doesn’t know what he’s saying? That is what people – when I looked at the topics of discussion, what is dominating,” he said.

“If it were a better candidate (than Biden), Trump would lose easily.”

Stantic’s method is not infallible. It did, for instance, get the result of Australia’s same-sex marriage plebiscite wrong, for reasons he explained in detail afterwards.

But he says his lab’s analysis is more reliable than opinion polling, because it involves a significantly larger sample size.

“I think the polls are volatile because their sample size is very small. They have a thousand people, and it depends on who you interview,” he said.

“I’m talking about millions of posts. Last month, I think I had 800,000 posts in one day.

“It’s not just about these 800,000, but it’s also that some posts have 20,000-30,000 likes.

People also tend to be more honest when expressing their opinions on social media than when a pollster quizzes them.

And the peculiar nature of America’s system, which hinges on the candidates winning states (rather than, say, seats like in Australia), helps make Stantic’s job simpler, because the data allows him to pinpoint exactly which state people will be voting in.

“Australia, it’s a bit hard because of seats and their locations. The US election, it’s easier to predict,” he said.

“Users put the state in their location when they open their accounts.

“It’s much easier to identify a location, and then everything else is pure mathematics.”