By Erin Albright, Staff Writer
With less than a week until the 2020 presidential election, pollsters have been unable to clearly predict which candidate will take Ohio’s 18 electoral votes.
Polling ahead of the 2020 election looks worse for Donald Trump than it did prior to the 2016 election. Results from statewide polls have shown both candidates winning by a three point margin.
No Republican has ever won a presidential election without taking Ohio, adding to the pressure for Trump as an incumbent.
“If he doesn’t win Ohio, it’s over,” University of Akron political scientist David Cohen said. Donald Trump won the 2016 Ohio voters by a margin of 8.13 points.
Trusted polling sources for Ohio all are within the margin of error. Quinnipiac University holds Biden at 48% and Trump at 47%. Fox News depicts Biden at 45% and Trump at 48%. The New York Times, in conjunction with Siena College, has Biden at 45% and Trump at 44%.
Online pollster FiveThirtyEight’s online model shows Ohio voters having swung between Trump and Biden since early March. However, Trump gained a steadily increasing lead beginning on Oct.15 as the election inched closer. Its latest analysis predicts Ohio swinging toward Trump by just 1.5%, with the president winning 50.4% of Ohioans’ votes.
Overall, ahead of the election, the polls of Ohio voters are generally inconclusive. While Fox News and Hart Research Associates favor Trump, Quinnipiac University and NYT/Siena College hold that Biden will win.
While most polls have consisted analyses of online surveys, Busken Bakery has taken a different method to predicting who will win on Nov. 3.
The local bakery has held a Presidential Cookie Poll since 1984. Busken Bakery has accurately predicted the winner of nine consecutive elections based on the highest selling cookie ahead of voting day.
By selling cookies with the candidates’ faces, the bakery has kept a Facebook tally of how many cookies of each candidate has been bought.
As of Oct. 26, the bakery has sold approximately 13,100 Trump cookies and 10,200 Biden cookies.