This article is a submission from thenewsletter by Kiko Llaneras, a newsletter for Morning Express subscribers:sign up here.
Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has moved into the lead in the polls for the November presidential election. The turnaround has been completed in just three weeks, as our polling average shows.
At the end of July, when Joe Biden announced that he was not seeking re-election, Donald Trump had the polls in his favour. He was winning the Trump-Biden duels by three points, and was also ahead when questions were asked about a Trump-Harris clash. However, those numbers have now been reversed: Harris now leads with 49% of the vote, compared to Trump’s 46%.
The graph shows my average of polls, taking the polls that ask about two candidates (not three or more) and only from the best pollsters, according to FiveThirtyEight. I do this to have more control, although the result is similar in other averages. Harris has a two-point advantage in FiveThirtyEighthalf a point in Real Clear Politicsone or two in The New York Timesand two according to Nate Silver.
Harris’s rise is also being seen by Metaculus’ forecasters. They agree in predicting a close race: Harris would have a 55% chance of becoming president, compared to Trump’s 45% chance. Again, these are numbers similar to those offered by the betting and markets of Predictit and Polymarket.
The summary is simple: replacing Biden with Harris has excited Democratic supporters. It is striking that the former’s popularity has risen since he resigned, but above all, the gain of the latter is evident. The percentage of people with a favourable opinion of Harris has risen from 40% to 47% according to YouGov.
With the election tied again, many eyes have returned to the key states. The five that have the best chance of deciding the election are Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona. For example, according to the calculations of statistician Nate Silver, whoever wins Pennsylvania will have more than 90% chance of winning the presidency.
Why is the election so close? Because those five states are close. According to Metaculus, Harris has a slight lead in Michigan (61% chance of winning), Wisconsin (54%) and Pennsylvania (53%), while Trump is ahead in Georgia (55%) and Arizona (55%).
🥇The countries with the most Olympic merit
The USA and China usually dominate the medal table, but there are small or very poor countries with spectacular successes. The example this year is Saint Lucia, which with just 200,000 inhabitants has won two medals with the sprinter Julien Alfred. Tremendous.
There are two key variables in predicting success in the games: having a lot of population (and playing more tickets in the genetic lottery of athletic talent) and having a lot of money (to develop that talent).
How can we find the Olympic superpowers? We can use the following graph, which is an updated version of the one I published with Borja Andrino in 2021. By crossing the medal production per capita and the GDP of each country, the exceptional cases are highlighted:
The graph shows that the richest countries win more medals per capita, in general. But then there are the exceptional countries that win more medals than would be normal. Examples:
- Caribbean countries like Grenada, Saint Lucia or Jamaica. There are about 100,000 of them from Granada, but they have 5 medals, almost as many as Chile, which is 100 times bigger.
- The former Soviets. Lithuania, for example, has 21 medals, almost the same as Austria, which is richer and three times larger.
- Australia and New ZealandThe first is the only large country that has more than 10 medals per million inhabitants. It has twice as many medals as Spain, although it has half the population.
- The Nordics.Especially Denmark and the Netherlands.
- Kenya and Ethiopia.The two African countries obtain more metals than correspond to their size and poverty.
Finally, there are penalties for being a very large country. They find it difficult to win many medals per inhabitant, because they do not send all the athletes that correspond to them by population (otherwise, one in five would be Chinese). For example, Ireland has 133 athletes with 4.5 million inhabitants, Spain has 383 (with 47 million) and China 388 (with 1,389). Among the countries with more than 100 million inhabitants, those that win the most medals are Russia (2.4 per million), the USA (2.1), Japan (1.8), far ahead of Brazil (0.5) or China (0.3).
Other Olympic matters
🥇 1. Should we count all the medals or the golds?I was interested in this thread by statistician Kareem Carr, because this debate always comes up with the medal count. For example, right now Japan is officially fourth, ahead of Great Britain, because it has 15 golds instead of 14, but adding up all the medals, the British would win 57 to 36. Is that fair? With the thread, I reaffirm that the total medals are a better metric.
📸 2. The photofinish it’s not a photo.This video explains how it works. Spoiler: The image we see at the end of the race is not a single photo, but a bunch of photos, very close-up, placed side by side. We are not looking at a fixed instant, but at a fixed place, the finish line, over time.
This article is a submission from thenewsletter by Kiko Llaneras, a newsletter for Morning Express subscribers:sign up here.
