Juan Convers

There have been a some articles in the news lately discusing how the current occupant of the white house is losing ground against his democractic rival including: The remarkable collapse of Donald Trumps polling numbers and States that Trump won easily in 2016 are looking tight for him in November. The news are not surprising, giving the horrible COVID-19 numbers on the USA, its ecnomic impact and the wave of protest againts police brutaliy. The data from realclearpolitics seems to confirm this trend.

The US democratic primaries are around the corner with the first state voting next monday. I was curious how the Google Search Trends in the last 7 days, reflect on each one of top tier candidates. Bernie Sanders is clearly winning on that “interest” field. Interesting to see what will happen in the actual Iowa caucuses.

On the 25th of April, Joe Biden announced he was joining the crowded democratic primaries race. The aggregate polls show an interesting trend. Even before his announcement he was leading the polls, but there was a clear but in his numbers afterwards. It's interesting to see what will happen in the months ahead. Will those trends continue and the main race is going to be between him a Bernie Sanders? or will there be another candaidate getting into the top spot?. Time will tell.

The previous charts show the US Senate and US House party control over time since the 19th century.

I always believed one the main problems with the presidential elections in Colombia, held every four years, is the timing: They always coincide with the Football World Cup!. Football is an extremely popular sport in the country and when the national squad qualifies to the tournament, the country turns the attention away from everthing except to this event.

The previous graph generated with Google Trends Search Data, relate to this point at least on the online sphere: The Colombian people are more interested in searching information about topics regarding the World Cup, than topics related to the presidentials.

The first round of this election will take on the 27th May and the second round on the 17th June (the World Cup starts on the 14th). Just saying ...

When Theresa May announced her intention to seek a general election back in April, the conservative lead on the polls over labor was around 21%. As you can see in the graph above this lead has been shrinking over time. It's very interesting to see what is going to happen in this election next month.

Today the French are voting in their presidential elections and the possibility of having a far right president, who has campaigned against Europe and NATO brings dark clouds to the European horizon. I'm hoping the french people will reject those proposals. Allez le bleus!

The polls aggregates from Real Clear Politics shows that Trump opinion has never been more favorable than unfavorable. In fact it has been reported he assumed office as one of the most unpopular presidents in the modern history. The trend show it's again down after a short increase following the election.

Looking at the final 2016 US presidential election results, it's remarkable how bad trump lost in California. 8.7 million vs 4.4 million votes. It's not surprising that on the days after the election the #calexit hashtag started to trend. Clinton won the popular vote, so many Americans will feel underrepresented based on the electoral college system they have in place, but nowhere this is more dramatic than in California.

This morning I woke up very early feeling a bit uneasy. I started to follow the live US presidential transmission and then slowly, it began to be clear that the Republican nominee was going to win. I was mentioning a couple of days ago, the main danger with this outcome is that the nationalists groups might feel empowered to spread and promote their hate speech. I'm really hoping this won't happen. And it was definitely a complete poll miss. A dangerous one.

Alright, the last 4 way presidential polls still put Clinton slightly ahead. Crossing the fingers the lead will hold. Yesterday the FBI director sent a letter clarifying there was nothing new in the emails from last week, so I hope the voters in the US will be able to compare the flaws of the democratic nominee against the real sexists, racist, protectionist and xenophobic positions of the Republican nominee.

Yesterday I saw the excellent documentary "Hate Rising" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOsRktPBNhI), a film where the journalist Jorge Ramos, explores how the current US election has empowered white nationalist groups, leading to a rise of hate in that country, including attacks to minority communities. This documentary brought memories back of my mother because I'm sure she would be extremely disappointed. Before she got sick and passed away, she worked with the Girl Scouts of the USA, setting up programs to make the Latino girls proud of their heritage and to help all the girls to feel equal and part of one nation.

"The most important task in my job is to make one world, It's important for the Latinos and it's important for the American people.", my mom used to say. I have been following close the US presidential elections, not only because I have many relatives and friends living in that country, but also because I truly believe, its outcome will have important repercussions around the world.

If you don't want to live in a country where hate is normalized, where sexist and misogynist views come from the top of the leadership and where your liberties and rights get curtailed under the "law and order" sophism, please vote on this binary election!. As an European I followed the Brexit vote closely because I still think the European Union project has brought a lot stability and peace to this continent and I thought it would be bad for my adoptive Irish nation. As you know the yes camp won mainly on “immigration control” grounds and unfortunately the attacks against immigrants communities increased immediately after the vote. The future of this nation looks gloomy, since most of the promises of the yes camp where not attainable.

On the other hand as a Colombian I was extremely hopeful about the referendum to accept the peace agreements signed in Cuba to put an end to the oldest civil conflict in the Latino American continent. For the first time of the civil war the two sides were serious about ending the conflict and didn’t use the talks as an strategy of war.It pained my heart to see how a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the opposition, helped the No camp to obtain victory. Now this conflict affecting mainly the minority populations living in the most remote and poorest parts of the country, is in a very dangerous stalemated situation.

As an immigrant on the other side of the atlantic, I'm really hoping the people appearing in Jorge’s documentary are a minority and that they don't reflect the United States population overall. And I really hope the outcome of the US presidential election will reflect this statement.

So please don't fall into the fear trap and go out and vote to make a stand against the people attacking the diversity that’s so needed in this world.

FiveThirtyEight, the interesting site focused on opinion poll analysis, has become of the most quoted sites in political news. A couple of days ago the published an interesting article on how the USA election electoral map would look like if only women voted, based on their polls models. It's interesting on how it would be landslide defeat of Donald Trump!

According to Nielsen, the presidential debates number of viewers are out, for the first debate between Trump and Clinton, and this was the most viewed debate in the history of the presidential debates (84 Million viewers). The second closest was the one that happened in 1980 between Reagan and Carter.

The US presidential election is far from over, since there are still some days ahead until November, but it's comforting to see evidence in the polls that Trump's divisive campaign is not 'winning' at all.

The map aboves shows the countries that currently have or ever had a female head of state. It's true the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton is a milestones achieved in the USA politics, but not in many countries of the world.

This morning I was reading in the fivethirtyeight site an interesting section dedicated to the US elections. They try to predict who will win the election based on the polls and historic data. They have been very accurate in the past so there are definitely an interesting source.

One of the articles linked on this site was a post titled why obama might be trump's biggest challenge where they discussed how president Obama is enjoying a high approval rate. The chart above is generated with the >>>Real Politics>"http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html" data they were mentioning in the post.

If you analyze the last 30 days of the tweeter feed between Trump and Sanders and plot the word frequency on a word cloud. It's revealing what do they candidates stand for. Guess which one belong to whom?

Asylum is defined as the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee, mainly for fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. The raging conflict in Syria there has been sharp increase in the number of refugees coming to Europe.

The last quarterly data report by Eurostat demonstrates this upwards trend. Germany and Sweden have been the countries who have welcomed the highest number of asylum seekers.

The last episode of the excellent show Last Week tonight from John Oliver dealt with a very contentious issue in the US: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRauXXz6t0Y". I really like the approach that he took on this matter, acknowledging there are different positions on this topic, but hammering the "hypocritical" laws that under the umbrella of protecting the "Women's health" target="_blank">The abortion laws crear barriers for people who need this medical procedure and unfortunately don't have the money to go somewhere else.

The next map shows the US states that had enacted laws to force the women requiring an abortion for see an ultrasound on the unwanted pregnancy:

Yesterday at the office we were discussing the issue about the possibility of the UK leaving the European Union. Actually we wrote in our company blog, what this brexit would mean for European workers, some time ago. But with all this brexit discussion, we forget the UK is actually one of the oldest members of the European Union (1973).

You can check this map in detail here

Last night I was reading in Business Insider the headline about how Bernie Sanders just melted away a 30-point Hillary Clinton lead in a new poll, related to the US presidential elections. Wikipedia has a useful article where they track the different polls for both parties. The results of those polls are reported here on that page: Democratic Primaries.

It's true that the last poll conducted by the Quinnipiac University shows a preference of: Clinton: 44% and Sanders 42%, and with a 4.5% margin of error, they are virtually tied. There is even a newer one performed by "Reuter/Ipsos" showing a similar trend: Clinton: 48% and Sanders 45% (with a 5% margin of error).

It's fascinating to see how this candidate without any of the infamous [superpacs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee#Super_PACs) behind him has been able to attrack so much attention and how it has become a real contender in the US 2016 presidential elections.