Trump has a good chance of winning. Here’s why

After four years of fire and fury, will the American people make history this November by re-electing an impeached president for the first time? Surely not. The leading polling aggregation website FiveThirtyEight currently gives Joe Biden a 70 per cent chance of winning and he has a lead over Trump in every national poll. All Biden has to do is flip Florida, where he currently leads, and one other state, and Trump is out.

And yet, if we’ve learned anything in recent years it’s that polling and statistical modelling are fundamentally flawed. A Biden victory might be statistically likely, but wasn’t the same true for Hillary Clinton in 2016? In fact, not only is Biden’s lead over Trump in key states less than Hillary’s was, but there are also a surprisingly large number of factors in Trump’s favour.

The polls

Although Biden has maintained a consistent lead in the polls, Trump has closed the gap to as little as one point nationwide in recent weeks. Polls also show that Trump’s supporters are more enthusiastic about Trump than Biden’s supporters are about Biden, and that more voters think that their neighbours will back Trump, not Biden. FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 30 per cent chance of winning, 1 per cent more than they gave him in 2016, and we all know what happened then. Then there is the fact that Trump and Biden are neck and neck in key swing states, and Trump is even ahead in Ohio, which has voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election since 1964 — “So Goes Ohio… So Goes the Nation”.

The primaries

Donald Trump ran for president once, won and sailed through the Republican primaries for re-election this year. Joe Biden is running for his third time in 32 years after bowing out due to scandal (1988) and poor performance (2008). He didn’t do much better this time around until a Lazarus-like comeback in South Carolina, which was probably due to a strange mix of pragmatism and desperation; his running mate, Kamala Harris, withdrew before the primaries had even begun. Professor Helmut Norpoth, who has correctly predicted five out of six elections in the last thirty years, gives Trump a 91 per cent chance of victory based on the primaries alone.

The economy, stupid

Before Covid-19, Trump presided over soaring economic growth and the lowest unemployment rate in over fifty years. Of course, his approval numbers plummeted with Covid-19, unemployment reaching its highest rate since the Great Depression and the economy experiencing its worst drop on record. But his economic approval rating has remained strong and it’s the one area where he consistently leads Biden. More importantly, the stock market keeps hitting record highs and, as has been highlighted, in 20 of the last 23 presidential elections, if stocks are up in the months before election day, the incumbent wins.

The President’s men

The Trump campaign raised $25 million more than Biden’s in July. They have raised over $1 billion in total and have spent the same amount — a record-breaking sum for an incumbent (and nearly $100 million more than Biden). This money is helping Trump outgun Biden in the digital and ground wars: he has more doorknockers, scheduled events and social media followers (and likes) than Biden. The Republicans are also outpacing Democrats in voter registration and control the majority of state governorships and state legislatures, including in important swing states like Florida. This is important because the procedures for voting are generally controlled at state level — and voting procedures have never been more contested than in 2020.

The candidates

If elected, Biden would be the oldest president ever and only the fourth challenger in a century to unseat a sitting president. He’d also be the first Catholic president since Kennedy and the first former vice president to be elected president since Nixon (and only the second on both counts). Harris, of course, would be the first black female vice president. As for Trump, remember that divisive and controversial presidents tend to get re-elected: Nixon after Watergate, Clinton after Whitewater and Bush Jr. after Iraq. In contrast, moderate and well-respected figures like Ford, Carter and Bush Sr. were all one-term presidents. If anyone is going to be the first impeached president to be re-elected, it’s Trump.

The radical left

Trump’s main line of attack is that Biden-Harris are puppets of the “radical left”. Harris’s status as the most liberal current senator is well-documented and Biden has earned the support of radical Democrats by endorsing policies such as the Green New Deal. He is in fact the first presidential candidate to commit to raising taxes since Walter Mondale in 1984. The problem is that left-wing Democrats tend to lose presidential elections (Mondale was defeated in a landslide), which is why they moved to the centre under Clinton and Obama. Of course, Biden’s Rooseveltian programme might fit the moment in 2020, but it’s worth remembering that Trump is no fiscal conservative, like Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover, and that Roosevelt was elected after a stock market crash, not a stock market high.

The hopey changey stuff

Whereas “Make America Great Again” fits the winning tradition of optimistic mantras used by the likes of Kennedy and Reagan, Biden’s “battle for the soul of the nation” is a strange slogan more reminiscent of Barry Goldwater’s “In your heart, you know he’s right” — and Goldwater lost in a landslide. The Democratic convention itself was a litany of nightly attacks on the president and was criticised even by sympathetic commentators as a gloomy affair. It’s worth remembering that Trump-bashing was avoided by successful Democrats in the 2018 midterms and that securing glowing endorsements from Hollywood, Wall Street and Washington plays right into Trump’s railings against “the establishment”.

The endorsement  

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up,” Barack Obama is reported to have said recently. It’s hardly the endorsement that Biden would want and, not only did Obama back Hillary rather than Biden in 2016 but, this time around, he didn’t endorse Biden for an entire year. This is important because recent history shows that vice presidents who receive only lukewarm backing from the presidents they have served go on to lose. This was true of Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and Al Gore; in comparison, Bush Sr. won in 1988 following a rousing convention speech from his former boss, Ronald Reagan.

The Bully Pulpit

While incumbency has its obvious drawbacks, it also offers sitting presidents particular advantages — as has become clear in recent weeks. Trump bypassed a congressional logjam by signing executive orders providing further coronavirus relief funding and brokered a major foreign policy achievement in the form of the Israel-UAE deal. He’s also used the bully pulpit to maximum effect, naturalising citizens live during the Republican convention and delivering his convention speech from the White House. Of course, the discovery of a Covid-19 treatment before November would also boost the incumbent’s re-election chances.

The conventions

FDR’s campaign manager, James Farley, believed that most voters decide who’ll they’ll vote for during the party conventions. This is Farley’s Law. Of course, this year the conventions were largely held virtually, and the TV ratings for both conventions were down from 2016, so their impact is difficult to judge. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that there was no considerable post-convention bounce to speak of for Biden. Trump, on the other hand, has just reached his highest approval rating to date and closed the gap with Biden to one point, putting him in good stead for his own bounce in the coming days, and if it’s above 3 points it would be above the average for incumbents. Don’t rule out Farley’s Law just yet.

The debates

The debates don’t tend to have much of an impact on presidential elections. The famous Nixon-Kennedy debates were hardly decisive: that election was one of the closest in US history. Nonetheless, it is Biden who will be more wary of them than Trump. After all, he was savaged by his own running mate, Kamala Harris, during the primary debates. And it is undoubtedly the gaff-prone Biden who has more to lose from four and half hours of primetime scrutiny than Trump, whose own gaffes seem to be a law unto themselves. Indeed, it was Trump, not Biden, who asked for a fourth debate.