Presidential elections are hard to predict. Even at this point in the polling, many Americans will change their vote, and supposed winners could be ousted at the finish. Over the past few months, several candidates have dropped their bid for the presidency, and left the election to bigger players, with much more support.
Most recently, Bobby Jindal, a republican hopeful, decided to drop his long-shot run for the GOP nomination. According to New York Times, Jindal ended his candidacy by saying, “This is not my time, so I am suspending my campaign for president.” Since October, republicans Rick Perry, John Bolton, and Scott Walker have also ended their campaigns. Despite this mass exodus of GOP candidates, the Atlantic says that as of November, there are still fourteen candidates running for the GOP nomination.
The democratic nomination has been much less contested; fairly early on three of the six major candidates dropped their candidacies: Lincoln Chafee, Lawrence Lessig, and Jim Webb. With Lessig’s drop on November 2nd, there are three democratic hopefuls still campaigning for their possible presidency: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley.
Many democrats had hoped the current vice president Joe Biden would announce his candidacy late in the game, but he ruled himself out of the running on October 21st, leaving Hillary Clinton as the leading candidate of the democratic party. According to RealClearPolitics, a recent ABC poll showed Clinton as nearly double the support of the other two candidates combined.
The same poll showed Donald Trump, republican hopeful, as the ongoing frontrunner of the GOP. Despite an early tight race in the GOP, it seems that few candidates have a chance to pass Trump in the current polls. Ben Carson and Marco Rubio seem to be the only candidates who have a chance at catching up to Trump in the primaries.
As we approach the final counts of the primaries, it is likely that the results will have changed from the polls we see now. But, as of the most recent polls, it seems that we may be facing a Trump vs. Clinton presidential race.
