Trump
Is Toast
Two new pieces of data are the final nails in
the coffin.
OCTOBER
22, 2020 4:44 PM
A few hours ago I wrote a piece explaining in some detail
why, if you take a 360-degree view of all of the polling data we’ve gathered
over the last four years, the current view—that Donald Trump is losing by
roughly 9 points—makes sense.
Since the time of that
writing there have been two developments that suggest we can take this
conclusion further:
Donald Trump is going to
lose the presidency, probably by a historic margin.
The first report is
a new poll from Gallup that asks the
fundamental question: “Does President Donald Trump deserve to be reelected?”
56 percent say “no.”
43 percent say “yes.”
That’s -13 for Trump.
Only 1 percent of the sample had no opinion.
This is death for an
incumbent. By comparison: In the same poll, 60 percent of respondents said that
their member of Congress deserves reelection and only 35 percent say their
member does not.
So get your head around
that: On the two federal offices that every American can vote on two weeks from
now, the average member of Congress is +25 on reelect; President Trump is -13.
There is no skew, no
shyness, no conspiracy that can overcome numbers like that.
The only thing that
could save Trump in this environment would be a COVID-driven black swan in
turnout. And for Trump that would mean low turnout. Because
the lower the turnout, the less representative the polls might be. The higher
turnout, the greater the polls’ predictive power.
Which brings us to the
second item: FiveThirtyEight is predicting a total turnout between 144
million and 165 million votes—with their pin set at 154 million votes.
It was difficult enough
to see Trump winning with turnout under 140 million votes. But if we wind up
north of 144 million it becomes basically impossible.
One reason turnout
matters is that the higher it goes, the less important the samples are—and thus the
more reliable the polls are as indicators of reality.
If 2020 turnout jumps 5
percent from 2016, it would be a lot. If it jumps 10 percent it would mean a Biden
landslide. (There were 137 million votes in 2016.) If we get 154 million votes
then Trump will be looking at the most resounding defeat of an incumbent
president in—at least—40 years.
Put those two numbers
together—Trump -13 on reelect and turnout in the vicinity of 154 million—and
you have a campaign that is effectively over. The only open question is the
magnitude of Trump’s coming loss.
But one thing is not in
doubt: When America wakes up on November 4, Joe Biden will have earned more
votes than any man who’s ever run for president.
That doesn’t tell us
anything about a Biden presidency, of course. You don’t get, say, an extra
Supreme Court appointment just for getting more votes than any presidential
candidate in American history. But it will be part of his mandate, part of the
continuing realignment of American politics, and the most vociferous rejection
of a sitting president in decades—and possibly in any of our lifetimes.
The Democratic party
will have a chance to rebuild America.
And the Republican party
will have defeat with dishonor.
