The pandemic restricting everyone to their homes has gotten us all glued to the TV or social media for news. Along with the pandemic, one of the most raging topics when it comes to current affairs is the US presidential elections. US being one of the biggest economies in the world is a major pillar of global economy. The economy of country is greatly influenced by the people in power. For a powerhouse like the US, politics is essential not only for itself but also for its allies and enemies.
- As the countdown to the 58th Daytona 500's green flag closes to just over a month away, race fans are starting to get the itch that a new season is almost here.
- The race was restarted under the lights after a delay of 6 hours, 21 minutes, 41 seconds.
- BOSTON — Accompanying a box stuffed with more than 3,000 signatures from registered Massachusetts voters, former Gov. William Weld stopped by Secretary of State William Galvin’s office Monday, a.
The Daytona 500 is a 200-lap, 500-mile (800 km) NASCAR Cup Series race held annually at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. It is one of four restrictor-plate races on the.
The US has seen a lot of turmoil in the last few days. Issues relating to the constant rise of coronavirus cases in the country and the George Floyd tragedy has resulted in a lot of public outrage and rightly so. People have taken to the streets and continue to do so to show their solidarity with the right causes.
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As much as it has brought the people of US together for a nobler cause, it has also caused an uncomfortable feeling of unrest among the masses towards the presiding government. What do the 2020 elections hold for the people of the United States? Only the people of United States can answer.
The reason why this year’s election is so intriguing for everyone is because of the two opponents that are standing against each other. The two opponents are Joe Biden and the present president of the United States of America, both representing the republican and democratic parties respectively. These two parties have been clashing since ages due to their differing ideologies and still continue to do till this date.
Now that we know about the opponents, let us discuss their chances of winning the 2020 elections.
Beginning with the present president the US it can be said that his chances of winning the elections seemed pretty good at the beginning of this year as compared to the present days. With the rising unrest in US, the support for Trump in the recent days has dampened. This decline has favoured the democratic representative, Joe Biden greatly.
Joe Biden on the other hand seems to have an edge when it comes to the 2020 presidential elections. With Indian origin Kamala Harris on his side as vice president, Joe Biden is all set to take the 2020 elections by storm due to good representation.
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Kanye West, the famous rapper is also a contender but his chances of winning the elections are quite bleak as compared to the other two parties. Conclusively, the US elections have always been and will always be of a very volatile and changing nature. History is witness of how the US elections can turn from favourable to unfavourable or vice versa to a contender in a matter of a few months. All we can do for now is to rightly cast our vote and then wait and wish for the best party to win.
It's finally here: the eve of the kitschest night of the year: the Eurovision song contest. While for most the fun comes tomorrow – who'll have the strangest accent? Will the hosts be dire? Will anyone actually give the UK any points? – for us at the Datablog the real fun, of course, is in the stats.
So, all week we've done nothing more than work out how to predict who's going to win this year's contest. And we're going to – boldly – set out what we reckon below. But any gambling losses as a result of our predictions are, we're afraid, entirely on your own heads.
We've tried to predict the Eurovision before, in 2011, and didn't do too badly: the eventual winner was in our predicted top three. This year, though, we've got two rival systems – one from our data editor, James, and the other from Margot Huysman.
Prediction one: the cynic's view – James
By now, even infants aren't naïve enough to think the Eurovision Song Contest has anything to do with music. It's all about politics: who likes who, who's in, who's out – and who might cut off the oil supply this winter if they don't get douze points.
Crunching scoring data from the last ten years corroborates the cynics' view (as most things do): voting blocs seem to be pretty real, and points given correlate with points received. We've put all of this voting information in the interactive graphic below. The eastern European voting bloc in particular seems quite strong:
So, what does that mean for the winner? At the extreme, it suggests we could ignore the song entirely, and just look at the voting patterns for the last decade: the countries who score well one year should score pretty well the next (with the song being mere random noise).
That's what we've shown in the table below – which averages scores over the last decade, then removes countries which haven't reached the final for the last five years.
2003 | 2005 | 2007 | 2009 | 2011 | Average | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Azerbaijan | 115 | 183 | 140 | 204 | 141 | 156.6 | |||||
| Russia | 164 | 67 | 57 | 242 | 192 | 252 | 83 | 90 | 74 | 238 | 145.9 |
| Serbia | 248 | 142 | 55 | 80 | 192 | 143.4 | |||||
| Turkey | 167 | 192 | 92 | 91 | 162 | 134 | 163 | 157 | 104 | 140.2 | |
| Greece | 25 | 244 | 226 | 127 | 136 | 187 | 106 | 140 | 104 | 64 | 135.9 |
| Italy | 173 | 87 | 130.0 | ||||||||
| Ukraine | 30 | 270 | 30 | 140 | 209 | 212 | 71 | 108 | 159 | 65 | 129.4 |
| Armenia | 129 | 128 | 178 | 74 | 137 | 129.2 | |||||
| Sweden | 107 | 165 | 30 | 162 | 49 | 47 | 31 | 169 | 350 | 123.3 | |
| Norway | 123 | 3 | 123 | 36 | 174 | 362 | 35 | 7 | 107.9 | ||
| Belgium | 165 | 6 | 136 | 102.3 | |||||||
| Georgia | 96 | 79 | 130 | 98 | 100.8 | ||||||
| Bosnia-Herzegovina | 27 | 91 | 79 | 229 | 95 | 99 | 90 | 45 | 125 | 49 | 92.9 |
| Romania | 73 | 18 | 151 | 169 | 74 | 44 | 40 | 158 | 76 | 71 | 87.4 |
| Finland | 282 | 46 | 31 | 19 | 57 | 87.0 | |||||
| Denmark | 122 | 26 | 56 | 69 | 147 | 130 | 21 | 81.6 | |||
| Belarus | 140 | 18 | 79.0 | ||||||||
| Estonia | 14 | 129 | 44 | 120 | 76.8 | ||||||
| Moldova | 148 | 22 | 105 | 69 | 27 | 68 | 73.2 | ||||
| Hungary | 91 | 122 | 53 | 19 | 71.2 | ||||||
| Germany | 53 | 93 | 4 | 36 | 44 | 14 | 35 | 226 | 107 | 100 | 71.2 |
| Iceland | 81 | 16 | 64 | 198 | 41 | 49 | 40 | 69.9 | |||
| Lithuania | 155 | 27 | 22 | 63 | 69 | 67.2 | |||||
| Albania | 106 | 53 | 45 | 41 | 42 | 116 | 67.2 | ||||
| Israel | 17 | 146 | 4 | 109 | 38 | 71 | 64.2 | ||||
| Cyprus | 15 | 166 | 46 | 27 | 65 | 63.8 | |||||
| Latvia | 5 | 143 | 30 | 54 | 75 | 61.4 | |||||
| Switzerland | 127 | 30 | 19 | 58.7 | |||||||
| Austria | 101 | 9 | 62 | 57.3 | |||||||
| Macedonia | 47 | 52 | 56 | 58 | 63 | 55.2 | |||||
| Croatia | 29 | 50 | 115 | 56 | 42 | 37 | 54.8 | ||||
| Malta | 4 | 44 | 192 | 1 | 30 | 39 | 51.7 | ||||
| Spain | 81 | 75 | 16 | 6 | 39 | 43 | 11 | 68 | 50 | 95 | 48.4 |
| Ireland | 53 | 7 | 89 | 5 | 19 | 119 | 46 | 48.3 | |||
| Poland | 90 | 27 | 14 | 43.7 | |||||||
| United Kingdom | 29 | 18 | 23 | 19 | 8 | 156 | 10 | 98 | 12 | 41.4 | |
| France | 19 | 33 | 6 | 5 | 11 | 44 | 103 | 81 | 79 | 21 | 40.2 |
| Portugal | 13 | 54 | 44 | 38 | 37.2 | ||||||
| Slovenia | 7 | 58 | 32.5 | ||||||||
| Netherlands | 45 | 11 | 28.0 |
It seems to bode well in particular for Azerbaijan and Russia on Saturday night, but then as the next two top tips haven't even made the final (gulp), the third tip has to be Greece.
But are they really all that popular in the Eurozone right now? And could they afford the hosting bill if they win?
Prediction two: the song matters – Margot
Until 2004, qualification for the Eurovision contest was based on the average points received over the five previous years. However, that year, the system was dropped in favour of semi-finals.
The songs performed in the semi-finals are exactly the same as the ones performed during the final, and apart from a longer running order, all three nights are quite similar. If votes are based on preferences, then the songs that are popular in the semi-finals are popular in the final show as well.
Ever since the institution of the semi-final system, the winner of the competition has been present in the list of top songs in the semis. The only time this has not happened was when Germany won in 2010.
The data looks good for using the semis to predict the result: for the nerds, about 31% of the score in the finals is predicted by the score in the semis. In other words, you're really quite likely to score well in the finals if you do in the semis. So this is a brilliant way of predicting the final!
A slight flaw in this method is that it does not account for countries that are directly qualified for the final, which are France, the UK, Germany, Spain and Italy. However, none of these countries – except, as we said earlier, Germany – have won in the last nine years.
There's maybe a bigger problem, though. Eurovision themselves have also realised the semi-finals help prediction a lot. And so in order to 'maintain the suspense going until the last minute', they've hidden the results.
But if you had access to the points, looking at the top scorers in the semi-finals could give you a good indication of who will be in the top three.
This being the Guardian, though, we've come up with a cunning workaround. On Friday morning, we asked people for their top three semi-final acts. More than 1,000 people responded to the unscientific poll (thanks!) – and based on that, expect good things from the Netherlands, Denmark and Greece.
The verdict
So, we have two battling sets of predictions.
Using the semi-finals to predict the finals looks pretty good: it's the richest source of data, it's pretty logical, and the correlation seems to back it up. But there's a big unknown quantity as a result of not having the real figures.
But if this is the system for you, our tips are: the Netherlands (33/1), Denmark (8/11) and Greece (50/1).
If you prefer the old-fashioned 'the song doesn't matter' approach, then Azerbaijan (16/1), Russia (16/1) and Greece (50/1) are the picks for you.
Odds taken from oddschecker.com and correct as at 13:30 on Friday. We're not endorsing betting, though.
Alas, only if you're a wildly patriotic (and optimistic) Brit can we recommend rooting for Bonnie Tyler. But good luck with it all the same.
What do you think of our predictions? Got a system of your own? Let us know in the comments below or via Twitter @guardiandata – and if you want to make one from scratch, we've included all the voting data since 1975 in the Google doc below.