Already and this this is the Daily This is the Daily oas Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Monday, the seventh of October. I'm Sam, I'm Zara. There are only twenty eight days until the US presidential election, and according to most major polls, it's almost neck and neck between current Vice President Kamala Harris of the Democratic Party
and former Republican President Donald Trump. Whilst the polls don't tell us too much about who's going to win, they do tell us where to look for clues, and that's the seven important swing states, and they're universally believed to be crucial to whoever will eventually take the White House. In today's podcast, I talk to Chaz Lichadello, he's the host of ABC's Planet America, to go a bit deeper
into this idea of swing states. We also talk about opinion polling and the art of trying to predict US politics. This isn't necessarily an episode about the big players in this year's election. Rather, it's about the mechanics of the US political system and some of the key ideas that helps the rest of the news make a bit more sense. We're going to get into that chat in just a minute, but first, Sarah, what is making headlines?
Today marks one year since the October seven attack by Hamas on Israel, where twelve hundred people were killed and two hundred and fifty one people were taken hostage. A day later, Israel declared war on Hamas, and since that time, over forty one thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Australia's Jewish communities are holding a number of commemorations to mark the anniversary of October seven. The weekend also saw
mass pro Palestinian protests across the country. Yesterday, TDA posted an explainer on the salient moments of the Middle Eastern conflence over the past twelve months. In the lead up to the anniversary.
Hundreds of Australians have landed in Cyprus on flights from the Lebanese capital of Beirute, after boarding Australian government charter flights launched to assist citizens to flee the wartorn country. Israel has launched a series of intense air strikes and a ground operation on southern Lebanon, which it says is aimed at destroying terror group hezbola. According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, over twelve hundred people have been killed over the past two weeks.
The federal government has reached out to states and territories asking for help developing plans to ban social media for children. PM Anthony Abernezi has written to leaders across the country requesting a range of things, including details on what the preferred age limit would be, how they can implement the plan, and what sort of exemptions could be considered. Last month, the Australian government announced it would legislate an age limit
by the end of this year. South Australia became the first date to take steps towards in reducing a limit for children under fourteen.
Earlier this year, and in today's good News, scientists have discovered a plastic eating bacteria that could be used to help break down waste. Researchers from Northwestern University in the US have discovered a bacteria in waste water that can break down the plastic used in common food and drink packaging and consume it as a food source. Researchers said the discovery opens up the potential for the bacteria to be used at scale to reduce microplastic pollutants in the
world's oceans, which threaten drinking water supplies and biodiversity. As we edge closer and closer to the upcoming US presidential election, you might notice some terms getting thrown around not only by The Daily Ohs, but by all national and international media that are unique to US politics, things like the electoral college, swing states, particular discussions that are happening around
abortion or gun control. I think a really important part of being a news consumer in the lead up to a US election is actually taking some time to understand what some of these very US specific ideas are. Now. One of the ideas that there's come up a lot when talking about the election with people here at the Daily Ohs but also just friends and family, is why both presidential candidates are spending so much time in very
specific parts of the country. And the answer, of course, is this idea of swing states, or as they're referred to sometimes in US media, battleground states. I wanted to go a bit deeper into this, and it kind of leads into a conversation about polling because, as you're hear in my discussion with the co host of Planet America, Chas Lichadello. We often looked at polls for a bit of a clue as to who is leading in these
swing states. So this is an interesting conversation. It's a little bit more about how to understand the system rather than the candidates themselves. We spend so much talking about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump all linked to some episodes where we can talk about their policies. But here's that chat with Chas about all things swing states. Chas, thanks so much for joining us today. I wanted to get your temperature on how you're feeling about the election. You're
stuck with me in the lift. You've got thirty seconds. Where are we at.
We have seven states they're going to determine this election, and they are all within two points of the other side winning those states. Two points is a magic number. It's the margin of error of almost every poll that you see. What that means is literally either side can win any of seven states. And that's been the case now for over a month. I bet that's not going to change. I think we're looking at potentially the closest
election that's ever been run, and I reckon that. Anyone who says they know who's going to win going up to this election is full of shit. It's going to be really, really close.
And so when you're talking about those seven states, you're referring to swing states, you're referring to sometimes I've heard them, particularly in US media, called battleground states, and those are the seven that hold the key. So I might just take a moment to actually take you through these seven states that we are talking about so much and run you through not only where they are in the country, but also how many electoral votes they each hold. So
Pennsylvania is the big one of the seven. It has nineteen electoral votes. Then we have North Carolina and Georgia they've got sixteen each, Michigan has fifteen, Arizona has eleven, Wisconsin has ten, and Nevada has six. Now, if we were to look at the polls, it looks like at the moment, Karmala Harris is leading in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Trump is leading in North Carolina and Georgia. And it's a bit of a lineball decision in Arizona.
Besides for the fact that they're very close contests, why those seven.
There's nothing special that each of these states. They all very different from each other. The only thing they have in common is they happen to have about fifty percent Republicans and fifty percent Democrats. Are the people who are
willing to vote. And that's an important emphasis that people who are willing to vote, because I don't think people realize how few people do vote in America, and if one side can convince people who haven't voted before to turn out to vote, we wouldn't know it until election day. The reason why I say that is because one of the keys with polls is what they call a likely voter model. Because they don't just decide. They don't just ask any rando in a poll. They ask people who
they think are likely to vote. Now, when you say likely to vote, how do they know who's likely to vote? You might think, Oh, they just ask them, are you going to vote? And if they say yes, then they say they're likely to vote. No, they don't do that because people lie and people have no idea. In the past, about twenty seven to twenty eight percent of people who say they're definitely going to vote do not vote. So the way they determine this is by looking at your
voting history. Because in America you can buy people's voting history, and so if you haven't voted before, you're never going to be in a poll, which means if one side gets out an extra three or four percent of voters, they won't turn up in any poll at all because they're not likely voters, which is why when you have a close election like this, could be a big surprise who wins in a particular state.
And so is that the key dynamic at play in terms of polling, because obviously here in Australia we have compulsory polling, So if you did a census based example of Australians, they have to vote, so you don't have that extra layer of complexity. Is that why you think there's this narrative that the polls have constantly gotten it wrong.
Yes. Yes, it is the hardest thing in the world for a polster in America to try and work out who is going to actually turn up to vote.
So why do we pay so much attention to them in the media.
Because if we don't pay attention to them, we've got no common frame of reference to talk about politics. Like when I say to you, say, for instance, you asked me about the debate and you say, who went well? The first thing I would say is what the poll said. If I said, oh, I thought Trump went well, then you go, well, yeah, sure you thought that, but someone
else might think something else. And so the only way in this world that we can evaluate anything that even sounds objective is through some kind of referee, and that is polling. So, even though polling is kind of fools gold, it feels like objectivity, and so we, in our very subjective existence, we reach for whatever objectivity we can find.
Explain to me, why then we're going to see the candidates both candidates spend so much time in these states when there might be other states. Let's take California, for example, which Kamala Harris is going to win. I mean, we can say that with almost perfect certainty. There's such a bigger population in a place like California than one of
the swing states. Let's take Arizona or Pennsylvania. Why are we going to see her campaign bus pull up so many more times in Pennsylvania for let's say, sixty thousand votes in one particular community than Los Angeles, where she could have millions.
It's because the way the electoral college works in America which is how they determine who wins the presidential election is not by the number of votes. They don't care about the number of votes. What they care about is how many states you win or how many states you get a majority in, and how much each state is worth. And the way they determine how much each state is worth it's quite a complicated formula, but essentially, the greater
the population, the more a state is worth. So say California, off the top of my head, I think is worth fifty five electoral college votes, whereas Nevada, of the top of my head, is worth four I think electoral college votes. So California is worth many more than the Vada. But you get those fifty five electoral college votes from in California just for getting fifty one percent of the vote in California. In California, there's seventy percent of the voter
as a Democratic. There's no point for either side to step one foot inside California because the fifty one percent is already determined and the fifty five votes are going to the Democrats. You're wasting your time. You might as well spend time in states where it's really really close and uncertain where those electoral College votes are going to go, and they're the swing states, which is why everyone spends time there.
I don't know if you've ever been in a swing state in the lead up to an election, but is it overwhelming? Like I imagine this huge political infrastructure of both parties kind of cascading in on corners of America that are largely quiet, you know, three years and eleven months, and then they're just crazy for a month.
Look, I wish I could tell you personal experience, but I've never even been in America during an election campaign, let alone in the swing state during an election campaign, So I can't tell you from my own personal experience. Yeah,
I can tell you this. I can't tell you that not only do people get in physical fist fights over yard signs, which is like the signs out the front of their house saying vote vote for Trump, vote for vote for Harris, but I can also tell you for a fact that the primetime ad breaks in swing states often have four to six ads about the election per ad break for the entire three months leading up to the election. So that would be quite overwhelming, I.
Imagine, and I'm sure the money being spent in those particular states is quite overwhelming as well. Has there been any sense that this electoral college model, where some states are worth more than others, it's not a representative sample of the US population. Has that been challenged? But like, is that an election issue in itself?
It's like many things in America, when a system favors one particular party over the other, well, it seems too in an election, the people's opinions get filtered the long party lines. So right now, Democrats despise the electoral college system because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. Al Gore won the popular vote but
lost the electoral college in two thousand. So Democrats wish it wasn't an election issue, but Republicans would never let it be because they're very happy about the system at the moment. Now. It's illogical in both cases, because there's no reason why Republicans sometime in the future might not win the popular vote but lose the electoral college. But that's not how they think. They just look at the last election when it mattered, and they go, who did
it help helped my side? Then I like it, and so that's how it goes.
Cha's last question from me. You have the responsibility of presenting a shit to Australia to update them on the US in a really critical month. Where are you going to be looking? I mean, we've talked in this conversation about the polling, the issues that exist with polling, the reasons why perhaps it's been wrong in the past. We haven't talked about the media, of which you and I are both proud members of, but there are obviously well
talked out issues with US media as well. Where are you going to be looking for truth?
There's no one source in America of objective news. That's certainly the case. And I mean, obviously I shouldn't just say America. That's human nature, but America, particularly America, is a very Parsian country, and there are very few people who aren't extremely partisan, even by Australian standards. So I
certainly wouldn't recommend that particular source. What I would say is, if you are someone who cares about what's going on and you have a little bit of time, advise you to read widely, to read outlets from different points of view. That's certainly what I do. I mean, I wouldn't advise you to read all I read because I spend forty hours a day reading, but I would recommend if the other time, spend an hour flick through a couple of
different different publications. Pick out a right wing one, pick out a left wing one, because you're just you're never going to get the whole story from one particular publication. It just doesn't exist. They've all got their biases. Some are more biased than others, but all are biased. So you just need to read widely.
Something I've been saying to my friends as well is if you have the time, watch a full speech, So watch. You know, they're all uploaded by the Kamala Harris or the Donald Trump channels to YouTube. We are guilty, all of us, you know, ABC, TDA, everyone, of chopping these speeches up into packages so that audiences can get around
it really quickly. But there is I think a benefit in watching an entire rally and seeing how it plays out, how audiences respond to particular issues, unedited versions of their messaging.
I think that's excellent. I think that's excellent advice. And I would particularly say that with regards to probably the question I get asked more than any by Australians is how do people support Trump? Like Australians are really not Trump fans generally speaking, and a lot of Austrainians don't understand it at all. They just they go, well, the on these Americans, they seem smart. Why they suppoint this
person who I have antipathy for? I say I not me personally, but the person I'm speaking to and by the ways say to them is just watch a rally. Just watch a rally, and what you will find if you watch a Trump rally. There's plenty of silliness, there, no doubt about that, but at least you'll start to understand why people like it. You need to watch a
whole rally. And if you can't understand why people like a politician, forget Trump from now, just any politician, then I definitely would recommend what you just said to pull out one of their rallies and just just find out what their supporters see. And if you can't work it out, then you haven't watched enough.
It's only once every four years that we have to slowly start building our literacy around the swing states, the electoral college, the polling, the candidates chas. You've made that a little bit easier today. Thank you so much for your time, and we'll chat to you soon. That's how we've got time for on today's edition of The Daily Odds.
It's certainly raised a couple more questions than answers that conversation, and I think it's only good if we can have these sorts of chats about the way that the US presidential electoral system works. It's going to become more and more important than the weeks ahead to understand the significance of each states. And there was some really interesting stuff from Chas there at the end about how to become a better news consumer in what is one of the
most decisive and consequential elections in the world. We'll be back again for another episode of The Daily Ods tomorrow, but if you enjoyed that chat, I would love you to check us out on YouTube. That's where we're trying to grow this audience and engage more with the video side of a podcast. Try and watching a podcast kind of like watching a TV show. So if you could jump on there and follow us, it really does send a signal to YouTube that we're a channel worth paying
attention to helps us grow. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll speak to you again tomorrow.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Kalkutin woman from Gadighl country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest Rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.