So, Trump is on steroids. My first question is, how can you tell? Second, is not the phrase “Trump is on steroids” a liberal’s worst waking nightmare? I have every expectation that if he’s still on steroids at the next debate, the first time Biden pops off Trump will go all Incredible Hulk on him, and it will look something like this (which I still enjoy almost as much as those highlight reels of the media on election night in 2016), except on steroids!
Watching left-Twitter the last few days, coming up with a new conspiracy/deception theories about every 15 seconds, it occurs to me that they’ve never realized that of course a Manhattan real estate developer would know how to live rent-free in their heads for four years. Rent control won’t help them now! And the great thing is, even if Trump loses the election, he will continue to haunt liberals for the rest of their lives.
And about that election thing: there is simply no way that Trump is 14 points behind Biden, as the poll Paul wrote about yesterday contends. Or maybe he is, kinda like last time:
Hillary Clinton Leads Donald Trump by 14 Points Nationally in New Poll
Hillary Clinton has widened her lead over Donald Trump, polling 14 percentage points ahead nationally, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll, which comes 12 days before the presidential election. Conducted after the final presidential debate, the poll finds the Democratic nominee leads Trump among likely voters 51% to 37%, a significant lead over the Republican candidate.
Now, I can point to defects in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that comes up with the 14 point lead, or I can point to the other recent polls showing the race within 2 – 3 points. Actually, it might be worth sharing a bit of John Zogby’s analysis put out this morning:
There have been three national polls since the first Presidential debate. Two polls (one for Investors Business Daily by TIPP and the other by John Zogby Strategies-EMI Research Solutions) show a 3- and 2- point lead respectively by the former VP. The other by the Wall Street Journal and NBC with a 14-point lead by Mr. Biden. Let’s get the obvious out of the way. TIPP is an excellent polling outfit, one of the most accurate covering Presidential races over the past decade. The WSJ/NBC has been around a long time and is truly bipartisan – a joint project by prominent Democratic and Republican pollsters. And my Zogby polls have an unbroken record of near-perfect accuracy from 1996-2012.
So somebody is still wrong, as these polls differ by more than the margin of error. There’s more in the complete story at the link, but let me turn to other technical reasons to believe the election will be very close, and why Trump has a decent shot at winning even if he is in fact behind right now.
First, we need to wonder if there isn’t a very large “shy Trump vote” lurking out there. Given the non-stop media hostility (and social peer pressure) to Trump, do you think everyone is telling pollsters the Truth? The hint something is amiss is come from the consistent poll results that a large number of people keep saying their neighbor is going to vote for Trump, or that they expect Trump is going to win.
Second, we now have a mounting record of polls failing to catch the “shy Tory vote,” starting with the Brexit vote in Britain in 2016, and then the last Australian national election. Every single poll for two years showed the Labour Party would beat the Liberal Party at the next election, but on election day (in a nation with mandatory voting don’t forget), the Liberal Party won, chiefly because Australian voters were alarmed at the growing radicalism of the Labour Party. Sound familiar? Then in the last British election, while polls showed a Tory edge, none forecast the huge Tory landslide that occurred. It is easy to believe our polls are failing to catch a “shy Trump vote.”
Third, all the surveys show a huge enthusiasm gap between the two candidates. Trump voters are highly motivated, while Biden excites very few people. This gap usually counts for something. Hatred of Trump will motivate the Democratic base to turn out, but whether independents and weak-partisans will turn out to the same degree is unknown and unknowable. Some of the wide variance in the polls depends on how their turnout models are adjusted. They work just like climate models to some extent!
Fourth, there are some other, non-poll related technical factors to take into account. It is worth looking back for a moment to the 2012 election, when Obama became the first president ever re-elected with a lower vote total than his initial election. How did he do it? The Obama campaign was brilliant and thorough in identifying every possible pro-Obama voter, mostly through very sophisticated data mining, and turning every single one of them out to the polls on election day. But for this supreme campaign effort, Romney might have taken him. (By contrast, the RNC’s digital turnout effort in 2012 was a fiasco.) Unless the Trump campaign is incompetent, I expect they have replicated this method to a far better degree than Biden has been able to do, because they had a bigger head start. One clue: new Republican voter registrations in several swing states are up sharply, way ahead of new Democratic registrations. And the Trump campaign has been knocking on doors by the millions, while the Biden campaign has had very little direct voter contact.
And there are a number of intangibles I can mention that favor Trump’s re-election, but I’ll stop with these technical factors for now.
