What’s left of the election takes place tomorrow. (A good chunk of it is past, thanks to “early voting,” a measure I find revolting.) Will Trump win again in a heroic comeback against all odds as he did in 2016? I think not.
Numbers are of the essence. Although Trump and his supporters put on a good show, they still only get one vote apiece. I am very impressed by the size and fervor of the rallies, but 50,000 people at a rally cannot move the needle in a state’s electoral college. Does the huge crowd indicate that a huger following is coming behind them? Of course it does. There are 330 million people in the USA, and more than half of the votes in 2016 went to Clinton–but she still lost.
Numbers are of the essence. In 2016 we chortled over how the polls were wrong, the polls were fake, the polls showed Crooked Hillary with a 92% probability of beating Trump, ha, ha, ha. In fact, though, the polls were very accurate. They indicated that her share of the popular vote was 3.3% higher than Trump’s. As it turned out, she led by 2.1%. Unfortunately for her, that 2.1% lived in red states, and Trump won the electoral college. I think that the 1.2% error in polling shows a high level of accuracy. As of this morning, Biden is ahead by 7.6%. I know of no numbers anywhere that give me hope.
Pundits like Scott Adams and James Woods believe that the numbers are faked by mendacious researchers and Trump supporters are lying to the pollsters. I’m not close to the polling industry, so I can’t speak as an insider. I do know that “the establishment” took a holy vow in 2016 never to let this happen again and they’ve made good on their promise as they’ve had opportunity. For four years I’ve never heard one good thing about Trump in the mass media–not one! I see lies heaped upon lies in every column by every hate-filled commentator (e.g., “very fine people,” ” ripped from their mothers’ arms and locked in cages,” et al.), so I’m fully aware that nothing is beneath them. But I still don’t think that all of the pollsters are faking their data, knowing that the final results would make them look incompetent. Instead, I believe that the pro-Trump analysts are engaged in wishful thinking.
In 2016 Trump could make any promise he wished. Now such promises ring hollow. Ted Cruz warned us of this, saying that Trump was a pathological liar who could make three different, contradictory promises in one day and believe all three, and who was going to break every promise he was making during the campaign. Despite some exceptions, Cruz was quite right, but Trump’s base still doesn’t see it. They’re holding signs at rallies: “Promises Kept.”
Trump won some battleground states with those promises. An unlikely coalition of different interests saw in Trump a chance to return to sanity and make America great again. Today a lot of those people are either deceased or disillusioned.
I’ve been wrong before and I don’t claim to be deeply studied in this campaign’s data, so my opinions are available here free of charge. I just wanted to go on record: we are doomed.