The conventional wisdom has been that voters on both sides are pretty locked in and there aren’t many of us left who are persuadable. Unless Joe Biden does something amazing stupid, or Donald Trump shows the political savvy to move toward the middle, Biden looks to handily beat Trump.
But conventional wisdom may be wrong. It sure appears that the first and what may be the only presidential debate of the election peeled off a lot of Trump voters and moved them toward Biden. If you watched the debate (and some eighty million of us did) it becomes easier to understand. What we saw was the worst of Donald Trump, the inner child that shows up on Twitter, on full display. It was like the blinders for Trump came off for a lot of people as they realized quite literally that Trump was insane.
It’s either that and/or Trump’s acquiring covid-19, but the trend was noticed by pollsters immediately after the debate. Those queried after the debate told pollsters that they were voting for Biden by a range that increased by about five percent overall. States that didn’t look likely to be in play, like Texas, now look viable for Biden, so much so that his campaign is actually spending money in the state, which is huge and very expensive.
As for Trump, his campaign’s spending continues to diminish driven mostly by donations drying up – donors can sense he will lose and hate to waste their money. States that Trump won narrowly in 2016 now look out of the question this year, including Pennsylvania (where Biden has a ten-point lead), Michigan (ditto) and Wisconsin. If Trump wins Florida it will only be due to voter suppression as recent polls show Biden with a five-point lead in the state. The election is looking like a Biden tsunami.
Worse, millions of people have already voted so they can no longer be persuaded. We voted yesterday. Our ballots came in the mail but to make sure the U.S. Postal Service didn’t lose them I deposited them in the City Clerk’s box on the front steps of City Hall. Early voting is hugely outpacing 2016. The first day of early voting in Ohio saw lines of two hundred or more people deep. It sure looks like people are determined to vote and that voter suppression efforts will be markedly less effective this year. It will be interesting to see how many voters vote. We may reach turnout rates above seventy percent.
Real Clear Politics lets you create your own electoral college prediction map, so here’s mine. I see Biden getting no less than 351 electoral college votes.
Similarly, Real Clear Politics lets you create your own senate election prediction map. I see Democrats having at least 51 seats, with 3 toss up seats. One Georgia election is basically a primary, so it won’t be settled for some time, but it’s likely Democrats will end up with 52 – 53 senate seats overall, a likely 6-7 seat gain.
I won’t predict the House except that Democrats will retain and modestly expand their majority.
It’s unlikely that we will know the extent of Biden’s win on Election Night. It may take a week or so for it to become clear. But it should be clear that he has won decisively by the end of Election Night.
We can expect all sorts of dubious court challenges from the Trump campaign. You can also count on Trump to declare the election was massively rigged. A large Biden win may suppress actions by right-wing terrorists to try to foment violence and civil war. But we can expect some of it, and we can unfortunately expect Trump to egg these people on. So a Biden win doesn’t mean that he will be able to govern when he is inaugurated.
But at least the outlines of this election are now pretty clear to me, and if anything, it looks to be a bigger win for Democrats overall than I anticipated.
Occam's Razor 