BORIS Johnson’s former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has revealed polling data that suggests Donald Trump will win the 2024 US presidential election.
Cummings will not say why or who he is working with and gives little detail on the methodology of his model– leaving many people to question the accuracy of the data.
His model predicts that Trump will win 294 electoral college votes if he were to stand against Biden – a majority of 270 electoral college votes are needed to win the presidency.
Robert Peston – Political editor of ITV – shared a link to Cumming's blog on Twitter stating: "Dominic Cummings has done polling and data processing on the US 2024 presidential election.
"In classic Cummings style he won’t say why or who he is working with, and gives little detail on methodology. Attached are his electoral college estimates."
However, the post drew online criticism from many users due to the unverified nature of the polling statistics used by Cummings, which Peston shared.
.@Dominic2306 has done polling and data processing on the US 2024 presidential election. In classic Cummings style he won’t say why or who he is working with, and gives little detail on methodology. Attached are his electoral college estimates. They show Trump beats Biden just… pic.twitter.com/lQBszMlBIg
— Robert Peston (@Peston) April 17, 2023
The electoral college is the voting system used in America for presidential elections – each state is assigned a certain number of these electoral votes based on the number of congressional districts that they have, which roughly reflects the population of each state.
However, even the smallest states such as North Dakota require a minimum of three electoral votes which means larger states like Florida and California are underrepresented.
According to Cummings's numbers, Ron DeSantis – the governor of Florida, who is expected to run against Trump for the Republican nomination – would defeat Biden by a superior margin to Trump.
Trump also beats Kamala Harris much more convincingly than he would Biden, meanwhile the former president only marginally beats left-wing Democratic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In his blog, Cummings stated: “We built a model (with many times more data than normal polls) to predict who would win the electoral college in different matchups.
"We explored attitudes to possible presidential candidates. We explored crucial issues like the cost of living, health, abortion, crime and Ukraine.”
Cummings claimed that as part of the survey they ran focus groups in key states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.
He also wrote: "We made more effort than is made in normal polls to ensure we had an accurate sample of low-education, low-trust voters who do not pay much attention to normal news."
It’s important to note all the data was collected before Donald Trump was arrested in a case examining hush money paid to women who alleged sexual encounters with him.
However, Cummings – who was previously described as Boris Johnson’s de facto chief of staff – states that they actually found support among Republican voters for Trump increased after he was arrested.
