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A volunteer florist adds baby's breath flowers to a Valentine’s Day rose bouquet on Thursday, Feb. 13, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Pricey Valentines, Splurging on Teslas, China coughs up carbon, Liberia’s Boakai makes bold move, Will Colombia close Escobar trade?, Federal workforce cuts, Exclusive polling on federal cuts
200: Disruptive weather patterns fueled by climate change have inflicted major crop damage in West Africa, where most of the world’s cacao, the raw form of the bean that is processed into cocoa, is grown. The price of raw cocoa, chocolate’s key ingredient, has surged by 200% over the past year. Roses won’t be cheap either. Is there a “bah humbug” equivalent for Valentine’s Day?
400 million: The US State Department’s procurement forecast for 2025, which details purchases the agency expects to make, included $400 million for armored Tesla vehicles. Tesla is owned by someone called Elon Musk. On Wednesday, as this story started to make headlines, the document was updated, changing “Armored Tesla” to “Armored Electric Vehicles,” but the contract value remains the same.
94.5: Despite President Xi Jinping’s pledge that China’s carbon emissions would peak by 2030, the country’s coal plant construction climbed by 94.5 gigawatts in 2024, its highest level since 2015.
457: Liberian President Joseph Boakai has suspended 457 top government officials, including ministers, for failing to declare their assets to the country’s anti-corruption agency. The workers will be out for a month, unpaid, or until they provide the required declarations.
4,000: In Colombia, a bill aims to prohibit sales of merchandise glorifying Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord who has been linked to more than 4,000 murders. Vendors are not happy with the proposed law, insisting that Escobar merch sells well and helps support their families.
200,000: The Trump White House on Thursday instructed federal agency leaders to terminate the bulk of their probationary staff. This reportedly could impact as many as 200,000 employees who have worked for the federal government for less than a year. Some staffers in public safety and law enforcement roles are expected to be spared, so it’s unclear how many will be impacted.
59-10: An exclusive GZERO and Echelon poll found deep partisan divides over DOGE’s plans to shrink the US government. The poll found that 59% of Republicans believed cutting 300,000 federal jobs would increase government efficiency, compared to just 10% of Democrats. When it came to its efforts to dismantle USAID, 60% of Republicans support completely overhauling or eliminating the agency, compared to only 12% of Democrats.Graphic Truth: Americans' trust in courts plummets
American trust in its judicial system has fallen dramatically, plummeting away from other wealthy nations. New Gallup data shows American confidence in courts hitting a record low of 35% in 2024, placing it far behind the median of OECD countries where majority trust remains intact. The 20-point gap between US and OECD median trust levels in 2024 marks the widest divide since tracking began in 2006.
The 24-percentage-point decline over four years represents one of the steepest drops globally, rivaling decreases seen in countries experiencing political upheaval like Myanmar and Venezuela. This places the United States in concerning company, especially since dramatic institutional trust declines typically coincide with significant political instability or civil unrest.
The erosion of confidence spans political lines, though following different patterns. Among those disapproving of current leadership, trust fell from 46% to 29% since 2021, possibly because of Donald Trump supporters disagreements with the federal indictments brought against him for hush money, racketeering, and Jan. 6. Even more striking, those approving of leadership maintained steady confidence around 62% until 2024, when it dropped sharply to 44%, possibly reflecting dissatisfaction with the immunity Supreme Court ruling which favored Trump.
Exclusive GZERO Poll: What will Trump do first in office?
Donald Trump has promised a laundry list of things he will accomplish “on Day 1” in office. To name a few, he has vowed to immediately begin a mass deportation of immigrants, streamline the federal government, pardon Jan. 6 rioters, and roll back the Biden administration’s education and climate policies.
But Trump will face an uphill battle. While he will have a united Congress behind him, he will still need to circumvent budgetary, logistical, and political barriers – especially for some of his most ambitious goals, like deporting millions of immigrants.
With the help of Echelon Insights, GZERO polled over 1,000 Americans about what they think Donald Trump is likely to do first. The majority of respondents believed that Trump’s first priority in office will be deporting unauthorized immigrants, followed by pardoning Jan. 6 rioters and enacting tariffs on China.
What do you think Trump is likely to do first in office? Shoot us an email sharing your prediction here.Supporters of Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris cheer before the start of the golf cart rally in the retirement community of The Villages, Florida U.S. October, 14, 2024.
Harris and Trump take very different approaches in the homestretch
With exactly three weeks left before Election Day, both campaigns are battling it out on the ground for the handful of undecided voters who will decide the election. But the Harris and Trump teams seem to have very different assumptions about what will work.
According to a report by the New York Times, the Harris campaign is using a large, well-established party infrastructure to find, call, and knock on the doors of reliably Democratic voters from past cycles. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is taking its base for granted and instead using scrappier, less experienced networks to find people who don’t vote regularly but who might be Trump-curious.
What does that tell us? That as we enter the homestretch, the Blue Team, despite the boost in enthusiasm that came after Harris entered the race, is still more worried about shoring up its reliables than about pioneering fresh supporters, while the Red Team is betting it has a message that can bring new voters into the fold.
Where do things stand? The latest polling shows Harris ahead of Trump 48.5 to 46.1 nationwide, and holding a razor-thin lead in key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump holds a similarly slim edge in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.Exclusive: Americans care most about this issue ...
Polls reflect an American electorate split over who should become the 47th president. So GZERO decided to dig deeper and partnered with Echelon Insights for some exclusive polling to find out what Americans think should be the first geopolitical priority for the next US president, regardless of who ends up in the Oval Office in January.
Our survey of 1,005 voters found that across the political spectrum, a majority of Americans believe the Israel-Gaza war is the most pressing issue for the White House, followed by the Ukraine-Russia war, US-China relations, and then climate change.
Interestingly, climate change was the second most pressing issue for Democrats, with 26% of respondents saying it should be the top priority. Meanwhile, among Republicans, only 5% of respondents answered it was the biggest issue. The Ukraine-Russia war, which Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to end within 24 hours of taking office, came in second among Republicans’ top priorities, at 24%, compared to third for Democrats, at 18%.
This could be a reflection that Republicans share Trump’s belief that immediate action needs to be taken to end the Ukraine war (even if that comes at the expense of Ukraine), whereas Democrats are more satisfied with the continuation of the current administration’s support for Kyiv.
We also polled Americans on who they trusted more to be alone in a room with Vladimir Putin and found that the responses were almost as equally divided as the polls on who should be the next president, as you can see below:
Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff visit a watch party after Harris participated in a presidential debate with Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., September 10, 2024.
Harris won the debate, but will it matter on Election Day?
The presidential debate marks the unofficial point of the race when the majority of Americans start paying attention. As the dust begins to settle from Tuesday night’s showdown, early polls show Kamala Harris winning the debate 63% to 37%, according to a CNN poll, while YouGov’s poll has her winning 54% to 31% among registered voters who watched at least some of the debate, with 14% unsure.
Both Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton beat Donald Trump by even larger margins in 2020 and 2016, but only one of them went on to beat him in the electoral college on Election Day. So the question remains: Will the debate matter?
This is “the major unknown,” says Eurasia Group’s US analyst Noah Daponte-Smith. “I tend to think it won’t matter very much.”
“There are very few ‘gettable’ voters left, and polling has been remarkably stable in the race so far, with very little movement since Harris’ post-nomination ascendancy ended,” he explains.
Early polls also show that Harris didn’t change minds on the big issues. Despite her win, debate watchers still preferred Trump by 20 points on the economy and 23 points on immigration.
The real determining factor in a race this tight will be turnout. Harris may have won a few more supporters with a shining debate performance, but she needs to convince them to show up on Election Day. Meanwhile, Trump’s camp will be mobilized by the motivation to vote Democrats out of the Oval Office. With early voting kicking off next week in key states like Pennsylvania, we will be watching which candidate can drive more of their voters to the polls.
What’s better than a poll? A projection. What’s that?
Between now and the fall of 2025, both the United States and Canada will hold general elections with the incumbents up against the odds. President Joe Biden is in a tough reelection campaign against former President Donald Trump. It doesn’t help that calls for Biden to step aside are mounting, casting doubt on his capacity to run and serve another four-year term.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also facing calls to stand down — a former cabinet minister has said it’s time for him to go, as has a member of his caucus and at least three former Liberal MPs. Meanwhile, there are rumblings that some incumbents might bail on the next election, and there’s a significant chance that MPs, current or former, are keeping their true feelings to themselves, at least for now.
Trudeau’s Liberals trail their Conservative opponents by double digits, with some polls putting them 20 or more points behind.
With the drama of electoral uncertainty and breathless media coverage, these contests can sometimes look more like reality television than high-stakes democratic exercises. The horse race coverage of polls doesn’t help. Individual polls get reported as final words, definitive predictions of what will happen. But single polls are snapshots in time, subject to margins of error and the risk of being an outlier or of not telling the whole story.
But there’s a better way to predict election outcomes: projections. Made up of an aggregate of polls and complementary data, such as electoral history, current trends, and even economic data, projections give observers a broader sense of what’s going on in a race and what’s likely to happen. Of course, projections aren’t crystal balls — things can change, and campaigns can and do make a difference. But good data interpreted properly can give us a good sense of the likely result.
Canada and the US have various election projection resources, with 338 Canada, run by poll analyst Philippe Fournier, the mainstay up north, while Nate Silver’s 538 is a go-to in the US.
In the case of 338, Fournier is projecting bad news for Trudeau and Biden. As of this week, the site gives the Conservatives a greater than 99% chance of winning the most seats in the next Canadian election and a 99% chance of winning a majority government with a range of between 179 and 234 seats.
It also gives Trump a 69% chance of winning, taking 312 electoral college votes to Biden’s 226. That stands in stark contrast to 538, which, as of writing, features a simulation projecting Trump edging out Biden 271 to 267.
For his work on elections in Canada, Fournier’s methodology relies on weighted polls and draws on demographic data that includes age distribution, education level, population density, and immigration level riding-by-riding. Fournier notes that the data he draws on is available through the census and from Statistics Canada. His model for the US presidential race, however, is comparatively pared down, going state by state, drawing on polls and past results, and relying far less on demographic data.
The 2024 presidential election model at 538 uses polls, but it also adjusts its predictions by “correcting” poll bumps around convention time, connecting and correlating poll movements across states. “If President Joe Biden improves his standing in Nevada,” as 538’s G. Elliott Morris explains, “our forecast will also expect him to be polling better in states such as Arizona and New Mexico, which have similar demographics and are part of the same political region.”
Fournier and 338 have a solid record of correct predictions. In 13 general elections in Canada, federal and provincial, covering over 1,600 individual districts, 338 has managed to pick the winner 90% of the time, while 6% of their misses were within the margin of error. In an enterprise marked by the uncertainty of human behavior, and with countless data available, being accurate 9 out of 10 times is impressive. In the 2020 US election, Fournier correctly projected 48 of the 50 states.
Projections are powerful, but they aren’t oracles. In the context of the US presidential race, Noah Daponte-Smith, an analyst at Eurasia Group, says, “No forecast should be taken as definitive, especially five months out from the election.”
Daponte-Smith also points out that since different projection models rely on different methodologies and data — how they weight individual polls, which (if any) economic indicators they use, or how they manage polling error — their results may diverge from one another.
“These differing sets of assumptions mean that it is possible the forecasts move in opposite directions at some point in the race, potentially if polls are pointing in one direction while economic fundamentals are pointing in another,” he says.
The data, on aggregate, doesn’t tend to lie. But it has to be chosen, collected, and interpreted, and not all collection and interpretation is created equally. Fournier says that social media, right now, is “flooded with amateurs with spreadsheets.” Often, he says, election watchers will model a simple poll and draw conclusions, which he doesn’t do since there’s so much uncertainty from poll to poll.
“Using only one poll at the time, and projecting one poll at a time,” he says, “would be like rolling in the streets of Montreal or Ottawa without shock absorbers. You need shock absorbers. If a poll says, let's say, the Liberals are at 25 and the others say they’re at 20 a day later, they haven't lost five points in a day; they're somewhere between 22 and 23.”
By the time you aggregate polls — add the shock absorbers — you start to get a good picture of what’s likely to happen. The trick to understanding projections is to keep in mind that they’re probabilistic, which means they deal in probabilities, not certainties. As Fournier points out, “When you say that a candidate has a 90% chance to win, it sounds overwhelming. It sounds like, ‘Oh, it’s in the bag.’ But it also means that there’s a 10% chance that he doesn’t win, and 10% is 1 out of 10.”
A 1-in-10 chance might not sound like a lot, but imagine if you were told there’s a 10% chance that you’ll suddenly lose your life savings one day. Or drop dead. You’d quickly appreciate how significant small chances can be. Indeed, much of the US was reminded of that lesson in 2016 by watching the New York Times’ probability needle, which pointed to a probable Hillary Clinton win, until it didn’t.
While the Canadian election race isn’t close, the US contest is much closer. Fournier says that the large electoral vote lead he has projected for Trump is built on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania historically voting as a bloc, stretching back to the 1988 presidential election, and currently sitting as a toss-up that Biden must win to have a chance.
“It’s still a very close race,” he says. Nonetheless, “The favorite right now, undoubtedly, is Trump with the numbers that we have.”
US President Joe Biden waits to welcome President William Ruto of Kenya to the White House in Washington on May 22, 2024.
It’s Biden’s economy, stupid
The United States is plagued with a “vibecession” — where confidence in the economy is at stark odds with the actual data.
A new Harris poll forThe Guardian shows nearly three in five Americans believe the economy is shrinking and in recession. Nearly half of those polled also believe US unemployment is at a 50-year high.
But none of that is true.
So why the disconnect?
Much of the bad vibes are lingering from America’s post-COVID economic recovery. The US generally bounced backbetter than its peers, but inflation is still squeezing average Americans while the Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates high. Even if the stock market and GDP reachnewheights, so is Americans’ cost of living — and at a time when it costs more to borrow.
Another vibecession culprit: politics, baby. OneYouGov poll shows the percentage of Republican respondents who thought the economy was improving dropped from 64% in November 2020 to 6% after Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. Unsurprisingly, Democrats’ views on the economy also shot way up after Biden took office, without much changing economically.
If Americans’ perceptions of the economy are deeply entrenched with their political affiliation, is there anything Biden can do ahead of November’s election? His administration is working to bring downgas prices and slashstudent debt. But as long as prices and interest rates stay high, he may have a hard time swaying voters’ historically low confidence in his ability to do the right thing for the economy.