It is an odd election season. Pretty much everyone thinks the Democrats are on their way to a crushing victory, yet it is hard to see why. A whopping 56% of Americans say they are better off now than they were four years ago, and President Trump draws large, enthusiastic crowds wherever he goes. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is a pale shell of his formerly buffoonish self. When Joe is able to get out of bed, his campaign schedules intimate invitation-only events. Supposedly this is because of COVID, but everyone knows it is really because he doesn’t want to be embarrassed by his inability to draw a crowd. Probably no one outside of Biden’s immediate family particularly wants him to be president.
So what is going on? One possibility is that the conventional wisdom is wrong. At Townhall, Kevin McCullough, who has a pretty good record as an election forecaster, argues that we should believe our lying eyes:
To be exceedingly clear — I find no evidence of a Biden win outside of the media polls.
The candidates already know that the president is winning by a mile. President Trump can’t help but to continue to draw massive crowds (even while in the hospital.) Every weekend, in every state, in hundreds of cities bikers, truckers, boaters, horse and buggy people, and regular pedestrians are having larger and larger participation in various parades of support from Miami to Manhattan and from Beverly Hills to Capitol Hill. Meanwhile Biden has trouble getting more than a dozen to show up at a tour stop in Yuma. And we all know people who say “I didn’t vote for him then,” or “I wasn’t really sure about him in 2016,” who have converted to “I’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for him now.”
I was far from sure about Trump in 2016, but it would take an AK-47 to stop me from voting for him this year.
Is it significant that Candace Owens led a “Back the Blue” march through DC and to the White House yesterday consisting of thousands of African American voters? Is it important that President Trump received them? Does it seem to make an impact that President Trump oversaw the fastest job creation for Black Americans with the fastest growth in wages among the poorest Black Americans in the modern era? Evidently it does because he’s currently enjoying (what I perceive to be understated) support anywhere from 18 to 25 percent of Black Americans. When narrowed down to Black men he’s consistently in the low to mid-30s percentage wise. The modern era high for a GOP president is 11 percent. Democrat’s consistently need 90 to 95 percent support of Black voters to win. If Trump gets anything above 11 percent he wins big.
I agree that this is potentially a huge factor. Probably most blacks are on board with the BLM narrative–among other things, there is money in it–but many others are not. More jobs with better pay are a good platform.
Biden also has challenges with Hispanic voters. The president has seen a broad based support with Latinos that similarly to Blacks defies modern era history. One veteran of elections going back multiple decades told me last week that the president may enjoy support as high as 45 to 50 percent of the Hispanic vote.
I don’t know what the numbers will turn out to be, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence as well as polling data–and anecdotal evidence is not always inferior in this regard–suggesting that Trump enjoys considerably more Hispanic support than he did in 2016.
Then, of course, there is the economy, which was pretty much the only issue as recently as 1992 and 2008. And on the economy, Trump wins going away. McCullough concludes on a bullish note:
On November 3rd, President Trump won’t just win, he will break records, shift turn out patterns, and crush his way to the biggest re-election victory since Ronald Reagan.
We can dream. Finally, here is McCullough’s predicted electoral map:
Not to pour cold water on a much-needed bit of optimism, but McCullough has Minnesota going for Trump. But it has been reported here that the Trump campaign has pulled all of its remaining television ads from Minnesota stations.
Still, we can dream.
