I’ll start doing Q&A’s from time to time to help people sort out what is happening and what is important. We all need help staying grounded and feeling safer.
Q: Is President Trump out of time?
A: Joe Biden leads by double digits in the national polls. State level polling is slightly closer.
Biden’s lead is now so large that solidly Republican states like Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas might go Democratic. There are two weeks to go before the election; Trump needs the race to tighten sharply.
We are well past the point where a normal polling error would mean Trump has closed the gap. The President does have a statistical chance to win – polling averages put it at 12 chances out of 100. For Trump to win, either he would have to change, or some earth-shattering event would have to occur in his favor.
To me, it is apparent that Trump knows he is losing and doesn’t care. Everything he does suggests he will leave office blaming everyone but himself for losing and replace the critically ill Rush Limbaugh as the nation’s leading right-wing radio talk show host.
As Limbaugh has proven, being angry, misogynist, a little crazy, racist, and irresponsible, and conspiracy-minded is not a bad thing at all on talk show radio and the new platform of the Republican Party.
Trump is lining up his many excuses for losing. To me, that is clear.
Keep in mind that Trump seems incapable of altering course or taking even the simplest steps to improve his standing. The most reliable indicator is Trump himself; he is doing everything he can do to lose.
I doubt he wants to endure for more years of this while Mar-A-Largo and a lucrative (he needs the money) media career is just waiting for him. I sincerely doubt he will ever go to jail for anything. He’s 74 and will stall and battle his many pursuers until he is either demented or dead.
Either way, he gets off the hook.
Q: Can I trust the polls?
Yes. Many people are fearful of the polls because of Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, even though the polls were closer than people think. This year, they are manic about being accurate.
Pollsters have changed and strengthened their polling radically since 2016. I understand why people are frightened about a major polling mishap, but remember:
Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton, 2020 is not 2016 (people have had four years to get a good look at Trump), and Donald Trump today is not the Donald Trump, who campaigned as an outsider in 2026. So far, Biden’s campaign has performed flawlessly.
Trump is out of control and over the top.
Remember, the real force shaping this election is the coronavirus; I said earlier jokingly that the virus is stalking President Trump. I’m not laughing anymore.
The virus was making a comeback and gave Trump another huge chance to blow his-reelection changes. He could not have handled it worse than he did.
Q: How do I stay sane?
A: Pay attention to polling averages (not individual polls). Pay little or no attention to the “mood” of a campaign or “feeling” is sad to be.
If a campaign says they have it in the bag or sound too cocky, millions of dollars in donations will dry up. Biden spokespeople wring their hands every day about Trump winning out of fear voters won’t show up to vote or stop contributing.
The Trump people are insisting there will be a late surge, and the President will win. In politics, that’s how you know they believe he will lose.
The FiveThirtyEight polling averages and insights are the best and most reliable anywhere in the country or even the world that I know of.
I check them once a day, and that is the basis for much of my writing and feeling. So far, I have not been wrong once in my political writing here, and I credit FiveThirtyEight with most of that.
Today, out of 40,000 simulations and 100 outcomes, the site says Joe Biden wins 87 times out of 100.
Those are the highest probable outcome projections in the history of polling at this point in a national presidential election.
Q: What is interesting to watch out for?
The two most interesting shifts in recent polling are these: Trump is losing ground with white voters but gaining ground marginally among young Black men and Hispanic Americans, many of whom share his deep and newfound conservatism, or which relate to his attacks on socialism and the federal establishment.
Biden is enormously popular among Black women and older Black men.
The biggest shift by far, and the most meaningful in terms of the election, is that Trump is losing white suburban women in droves, which may turn the Senate Democratic and end all-Republican rule in a dozen or more state houses.
I hadn’t really thought much about statehouse control; you can read more about it here.
Q: What should I watch? It depends on how much you can stomach. Everyone is different.
A: I check the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and Politico sites at least once a day now (not all at once), and scan the range of cable news channels – CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Drudge – in the morning and early evening to see if anything important happened.
I find the other sources more careful, more balanced, and less hysterical.
This is way more than I would normally watch or read, but because of my column, One Man’s Truth, I feel the need to keep up.
As the election has progressed, I have the feeling the media coverage has gotten sharper and stronger; that’s a generalization.
Q: So?
A: Trump is lying so often know, pooh-poohing the pandemic, spreading clearly fake stories about Biden and his son Hunter, that no matter what he drops or claims, people just aren’t believing it outside of his hardcore of supporters.
That and his own over-the-top, tone-deaf, and blatantly racist desperation ploys suggest to me that he will lose the November election by a wide margin.
It’s more likely now that if there is a Biden wave, the Democrats will take control of the Senate and some state houses (I’m not sure about the state houses). I don’t see that changing given the rapidly approaching deadline and the many millions of Americans already voting.
Stay strong. Stay calm. Fear doesn’t help anyone or alter any realities. I’ll skip it. The media jumps up and down to keep you interested. You don’t have to bite every time. Turn off all media after dinner, and watch some comedy on your streaming channels.
I’m too exhausted after 4+ years of this to be anything *but* calm. Comatose, almost. Absentee ballot filled out and dropped directly into the County Clerk’s Official Ballot Drop Box (TM). Wake me when it’s over.
Can I just ask, as an outsider? The polls poll humans, not Electoral Colleges. The polls were actually right last time – they said Hillary would win, and she did indeed ‘win’ by a not insignificant 3M-odd votes. But with minority rule in the dysfunctional democracy that is the US (gerrymandering, voter suppression, Russian interference), Trump became president.
So, my question – how can people have any confidence in what the polls tell us, when the Electoral College (via a handful of swing states) has the final say, and can over-ride the results?
Sadly I can’t do anything productive as I’m not in the US. We just get to watch impotently from the sidelines as the US implodes, leaving a vacuum for who knows what.
The polls were not all correct last time, Isobel, and yes the polls do count electoral college votes, the cable news channels do daily updates and so does FiveThirty Eight. You can read them all here, and I have no reason to doubt their accuracy, since the Electoral College is crucial, the polls were not correct in counting them last time. They have changed much about their calculations, and I suspect it will be different this time.
Jon…
I appreciate that the national scene is usurping our attention. But there is a national interest in watching the statehouse.
While living in Texas, I discovered a role of state politics when I realized that my Washington congressman was based in a larger city (90) miles away. And political party predominance in that area was different from our city’s.
How did this happen?
Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution mandates an apportionment of representatives every ten years. This reapportionment takes place following the census.
The reapportionment process is vulnerable to gerrymandering, the creation of voting districts to favor one party. Gerrymandering begins the chain of cause and effect: a bias in the electorate produces biases in representation, in Congress, and in the legislative result.
In (37) states, district geographical boundaries are determined by STATE LEGISLATURES.
Gerrymandering played a role in the reapportionment of our Texas district. That district was deliberately defined to include both populations.
Due to population growth, Arizona will likely add a district during its 2021 session. Arizona has transferred its redistricting responsibility from the state legislature to an independent commission, said to be less political. But in Texas, the state legislature still controls the reapportionment process.
Four years of Trump has been like watching a soap opera in real life. Since his win, including the days leading up to the inauguration, were filled with scandals and a global audience continued to stayed tuned, mostly with the hope of Trump being kicked out (like in a normal democracy) every time he crossed that line. His constant lying created new norms and took the country down with him. His survival would have been impossible in any other democracy. My fury and disappointment is not only with Trump but with his lying, enabling stooges who managed to take a respected party in a totally different direction, away from the Reagan/Bush ethics and morals. The list for the ‘Hall of Shame’ is pretty long and how they can ever get back to what they were, is to be seen.
Because of the Trump die-hard ‘yes’ crowds, Biden, when he is President, will have an enormous challenge healing a country so badly polarized.