Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/709569
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 31 JULY 2016 11 News Trump won 35 states to Clinton's 29 and although Clinton won more votes – 15.8 million to Trump's 13.3 million – the Republican primaries were more crowded. While Clinton only had Sanders to beat, 16 Republican candidates tried to outsmart and outmanoeuvre Trump but none of the candidates – including GOP stalwarts Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio – could stop his juggernaut. Based on these results, the Primary Model designed by Helmut Norpoth – a political science professor at Stony Brook University in New York – pre- dicts that Trump will defeat Clinton with 87% certainty. Win probabilities favour Trump Political analyst and statistician Nate Silver's latest forecast sees Trump en- joying a three percentage point-great- er chance of beating Clinton if the election were held today. According to Silver's FiveThir- tyEight – a website that focuses on opinion poll analyses – Trump's cur- rent likelihood of winning stands at 51.6%, compared to Clinton's 48.4%. The win probabilities, or 'now-cast' results, are generated by simulating the election 20,000 times, which pro- duces a distribution of possible out- comes for each state. However, FiveThirtyEight's polls- plus model, which is a forecast based on polls, the economy and historical data, gives Clinton a 61.7% chance of winning and in his latest article Silver says that if Clinton exits the conven- tions in the same position that she entered them she would remain the favourite, "but a long way from a sure thing." A tie would see Trump elected President FiveThirtyEight estimates that the Republican nominee has a higher chance of losing the popular vote but win the Electoral College than Clin- ton. US Presidents are elected through the electoral college with a candidate winning a state's electoral college votes if the candidate gets the major- ity of popular votes cast in that state. Bigger states, such as California, Texas and Florida, have more elector- al college votes, and the winner needs an overall majority of those votes to become president. The FiveThirtyEight forecast based on poll averages shows Clinton win- ning the popular vote, but winning the presidency is a state-by-state game. Presidents are not popularly elected, as the world was shocked to learn when Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 only to lose to George W. Bush in the electoral college. In total, there are 538 electoral col- lege votes, meaning 270 are theoreti- cally needed. But Trump only needs to win 269 electoral college votes while Clinton will need to win 270. With both candidates neck-to-neck, a tie is possible and if Clinton and Trump both get 269 votes then the House of Representatives selects the President. And this spells trouble for Clinton because the House is – and will almost certainly remain – controlled by the Republicans. Demographics The largest obstacle for Trump in the November election is demograph- ics. After 2012, the Republican Party put together a plan to expand its ap- peal to non-white voters, but Trump might have blown this plan away with his anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric. According to a national NBC/WSJ poll taken in April, 69% of women, 79% of Latinos, and 88% of African Americans are negatively disposed to- ward Trump. On the other hand, Clinton wins those groups by wide margins: wom- en choose Clinton over Trump by 15 points, Hispanics by 37 points and African-Americans by an overwhelm- ing 75 points. However, not all is rosy for Clinton – seen as the representative of the old guard – who is hugely unpopular, and nearly 70% of all voters see her as un- trustworthy and dishonest. In the Republican primaries, Trump's support primarily came from white men without a college degree but while white voters without a de- gree made up 66% of the electorate in 1980, in the last election this went down to 36%. But nonetheless, Trump's best chance of winning the election is to take away white working-class Demo- crats from Clinton in the swing states. On the other side of the fence, Clin- ton is aiming at winning over well- educated and non-white Republicans who might be disenchanted with Trump's antics. While Clinton needs to up her game in convincing people to get out and vote, she has an easier job at hand be- cause unlike the Republicans, her vot- ing base is more united. Her only concern comes from the small but potentially pivotal number of voters to her left who are still bit- ter over the way the Democratic party handled the primaries in which she beat Sanders. During last week's convention in Philadelphia, a number of Sanders supporters booed Clinton and held up 'Bernie or Bust' placards. Bernie's supporters are mostly young and left-wing liberals who will most probably come around and vote for Clinton, albeit holding their noses. The same cannot be said about Trump, who will effectively need to win over reluctant Republicans while targeting white working class Demo- crats and non-whites. This is especially true for the swing states, including Pennsylvania, which is set to be the most prized state alongside Florida. In the 11 battleground states, Colo- rado, Virginia, Michigan, Pennsyl- vania and Wisconsin currently go to Clinton, while Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Iowa would go to Trump, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight projections. If Trump wins Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida he'd be on the cusp of victory but if he loses Pennsylvania he will have a Herculean task at hand as he would need to win Ohio, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada to make up for the loss. None of this should be taken as a prediction of a Trump or Clinton vic- tory but the Republican nominee is anything but an underdog. In the past 65 years, only one party has won three consecutive terms Inevitable or absurd? Football experts weigh in on bloated transfer prices €120 million for Paul Pogba (above left), €90 million for Gonzalo Higuain (above right): Maltese football experts share their views on the causes and consequences of football's bloated transfer fees TIM DIACONO BIRKIRKARA'S recent tri- umph over Scottish giants Hearts coupled with Valletta's narrow defeat to Serbian cham- pions Red Star Belgrade marked the most successful adventure for Maltese clubs in a European competition. However, Malta Football Players Association of- ficial Konrad Sultana sees these results in a more ominous con- text – the decline of football's 'middle ground' as the upshot of the ever-increasing spending power of larger clubs. "Look at how Birkirkara beat Hearts and how Valletta gave Red Star a run for their money; they would not have been able to achieve such results in the past," he told MaltaToday. "It's clear that the gap between the best leagues and those in the middle is increasing and that those in the middle are slipping further down. At this rate, all the top football talent will be conglomerated into four Euro- pean leagues. Indeed, pressure is growing on UEFA to replace the Champions League with a European Super League for the top few leagues." Transfer fees for footballers have reached dizzying heights, and will smash the €100 million ceiling when Paul Pogba's move from Juventus to Manchester United goes through. It is a grotesque sum of money, but perhaps justifiable in a market where 29-year old Argentine striker Gonzalo Higuain is val- ued at €90 million and teenage Portuguese midfielder Renato Sanches can go for €35 million. "I don't think Higuain is worth €90 million; if so, then Thomas Muller is worth €200 million," Konrad Sultana said bemusedly. "However, while these transfer fees seem ex- traordinary for people looking at them from the outside, at the end of the day clubs are run as businesses. They look at trans- fers as investments, with the fees recouped through image rights, merchandise and adver- tising fees." Indeed, Manchester United has reportedly already earned €90 million from shirt sales for their new superstar sign- ing, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, which could effectively balance their expenses on signing Paul Pog- ba. "At the end of the day, it's all about basic economics of sup- ply and demand," Sultana said. "The Premier League's new TV rights deal has exploded clubs' revenue, and so long as their income keeps increasing then players' price-tags will keep ad- justing upwards. "I admire clubs like Leicester, Dortmund and Atletico Madrid for developing young players rather than splashing the cash, but then again they use a dif- ferent business model – based on selling their players for a profit." MFPA secretary-general and former international defender Carlo Mamo argued that clubs' income hinges on their success on the pitch, which ultimately means that they must constant- ly have the best possible players on the payroll. When a player like Pogba emerges, the chanc- es are that many big teams will be interested, which would al- low his club to set a high bid- ding price. "Clubs are ready to keep on paying huge wages and trans- fer fees to try and acquire the best players, so as to keep on achieving good results," he said. "With good results, the club will make more profit. It's all about demand and supply." Angelo Micallef, a sports law- yer who yesterday launched an unsuccessful bid for the MFA's vice-presidency, said that the upward trend in footballer prices is likely to keep going up as football keeps growing as an industry and tapping into new markets. "At this level, sport is merely the vehicle, the platform, in the same way cinema or music are for celebrity actors and pop starts who similarly earn exor- bitant amounts of money," he told MaltaToday. "The sport- ing aspect relates to the skill and performance the elite ath- lete possesses that makes them so much in demand. The rest is pure economics. Clubs do their homework. They seek to bal- ance out those sums by exploit- ing the marketing potential that the athlete guarantees. That, in turn, has an impact on demand through merchandising and the sale of TV and image rights. The more stars a club can sign, the more it is followed by fans, and the likelier it is to advance in competitions that bring in prize and TV money. "Is this ok? Like most of us mortals I do think that these sums have become ridiculously high, but I hardly think the pro- cess can be reversed any time soon. It is nothing but a reflec- tion of our society, resting al- most exclusively on supply and demand tenets." tdiacono@mediatoday.com.mt