Donald Trump is going to win a second term
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When I wrote a piece on this site in July predicting Donald Trump would win a second term I admitted it was “bold” to do so. A friend asked me if I was merely being “contrarian” — that cynical journalistic (and dinner party) device to attract interest by saying the opposite to everyone else.
Since then the opinion polls have, if anything, got worse for Trump, and the time he has to turn them round has greatly diminished. No miracle cure for the coronavirus has emerged. The grim daily death toll in the United States remains high and compares badly to most other countries. It is one of the few countries that’s doing even worse than us per capita. When Trump contracted the virus, some were sympathetic, others less so. But it served to highlight concern about the very issue that Trump has sought to downplay. He would prefer to focus on other matters — crime, the economy, “culture wars”.
Then we have seen that the US media continues to be overwhelmingly anti-Trump. His overall complaints in this respect are valid even if his specific allegation about “fake news” may not always be. Last time round he had Fox News as his reliable cheerleader. Its coverage is much more mixed now, often giving airtime to Trump’s critics. This is a regular source of exasperation for the President, as conscientious followers of his Twitter feed will have spotted.
Yet this very climate makes me suspicious of the opinion polling. If voting for Trump is not considered socially respectable then it is not surprising if the pollsters have difficulty in assessing the full extent of his support.
The “shy Trumpers” don’t need to lie. They don’t need to claim they are voting for Joe Biden. They can simply refuse to take part in the survey. Pollsters respond that some of the surveys are done online rather than by an interviewer. So why would anyone be shy of a machine? Those Trump backers watching violent unrest on the TV news might not wish to disclose their allegiance to a computer either, perhaps suspicious of the assurances of anonymity.
It would not need a large number of Trump supporters to have these reservations. Just a small minority would be enough to make the polls go skew-wiff.
In the past, the Democrats have had a big campaign advantage with students and other young people. They are not switching to Trump but there is not much excitement for Joe Biden. Also, the Democrats have decided to restrict their “ground campaign” due to the coronavirus. The Republicans have chosen to be less constrained.
Voter registration totals suggest that the Republicans have improved their position relative to the Democrats in the “swing states” compared to 2016. For instance, in Florida the Democrats have a 134,000 voter registration advantage. Sounds good. However, in 2016, the Democrats had a 337,000 lead in registered voters and still lost. Some Republicans will vote Biden, some Democrats will vote Trump. Lots of Americans vote without officially registering as supporters of a party. Despite those caveats, the tallies still gives us a bit of a clue.
By the way, the reason for registering your affiliation (arrangements vary in different states) is to vote in the primary elections.Turnout for these is a broader measure of voter enthusiasm. In the primaries, Trump secured more votes than Biden. A bit puzzling that the Republicans would bother, since his nomination was a foregone conclusion. Trump’s opponent was Bill Weld, a libertarian protest candidate and former Governor of Massachusetts. Weld only got two per cent of the vote. Helmut Norpoth, professor of political science at Stony Brook University, has developed the Primary Model which puts the stress on such data as offering the best guide to previous US Presidential elections. On that basis, he predicts Trump will win.
One final reality check on the opinion polling comes with early voting. Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to vote early by post, this time. Thus you would expect Biden to have a big lead among those who have voted so far. Then you would expect Trump to have a big lead among those that pitch up on the day, which might, or might not, be enough to catch up. According to a Gallup poll 62 per cent of Democratic voters and 28 per cent of Republican voters plan to vote early. While Trump urges his supporters to vote in person to avoid fraud, Biden has urged voting by post to safeguard against coronavirus.
The Democrats do generally have a lead, but not by a huge margin. It is complicated, as dates vary by state as to when ballots are sent out. There is early voting in person — which Trump encourages — and again arrangements vary for this. Usually that has just started getting underway while the postal voting (as we would call it) has been going for a while.
The upshot is that the Democrats do not seem to have built up the sort of lead — in turnout or in vote share — to make them confident of withstanding the larger number of Trump voters turning out on November 3rd.
NBC News has a website that keeps track of the stats. Nationally it shows registered Democrats ahead of registered Republicans by 50 per cent to 32 per cent in ballots returned. This is well short of the ratio they would need, as implied from the Gallup poll, of over two to one. Of course, the national vote share isn’t what really matters — it’s the states with “competitive races”. Here Pennsylvania and North Carolina look encouraging for the Democrats, with the sort of huge lead they would be likely to need and expect. Florida’s lead is in line with the national average. But in other key races — Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Texas, Ohio — the Democrats lead is small or nonexistent.
If predicting a Trump victory was bold three months ago it is now — well — very bold. Yet I’m sticking with it. I don’t ignore the polling. It’s just that I don’t regard it as conclusive, especially when you factor in voter registration, primary turnout and early voting — plus a bit of gut instinct. So my advice is to place a bet on a Trump second term. You will get good odds. Then if he does win and you are dismayed by the result at least you can use the proceeds of your gambling to drown your sorrows.
