Why I’d be surprised, but not shocked, if Trump pulls off another upset victory.
Why I’d be surprised, but not shocked, if Trump pulls off another upset victory.
O n Election Night 2016, my father’s lifelong best friend sent me a Facebook message, asking who would win.
I had written more than 100 columns on the election for TheWeek.com by this point. But my father’s friend lives in Ireland, and the coverage of American politics there tends to magnify and intensify the kind of media bias you see here. I told him he probably wasn’t getting the whole story from The Irish Times and RTÉ. I even told him, somewhat perspicaciously, that there would be many Obama voters who voted for Trump. But I remained confident that Hillary would win, believing the chances of a Trump victory low.
He took that for what it was worth, and then said he was asking because, “I was in the USA last week and encountered more people willing to say they were voting Trump than I thought would be the case.”
He had been on a road trip through Pennsylvania. The contrast between what he had encountered in a one-week road trip through the Keystone State and what he had been told by the media had unsettled him.
Four years later, it still unsettles me.
I don’t consider myself in the business of making predictions. By 2016, I had been invested in the success of a style of politics one might call “Middle-American Radical” for over a decade. I had concluded over the course of the Obama years that this was the dog that didn’t bite. Little hints that I was wrong, like the surprisingly deep 2012 runs of two Republicans who had defected from free-trade orthodoxy, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, only seemed to confirm for me that I was right. Then, much to my surprise, Trump came along.
I always gave Trump a chance of winning, because I believe anyone who wins a major-party nomination these days has a fair shot. But still, after the Access Hollywood tape and Trump’s bad third debate performance, I thought Clinton would win.
Rich Lowry makes us put down markers on The Editors podcast. I’ve been giving Trump a chance of reelection below 20 percent for some time. And I’ve said that if the polling is not historically wrong, Joe Biden should win by enough that we’ll know the result tomorrow night, even if Pennsylvania’s count is incomplete or drags on through the rest of the week. Henry Olsen has a very similar political outlook to my own — he’s for a populist-nationalist right and skeptical of Trump. But he’s a much more capable analyst of election data than I am, and he’s predicting a comfortable Biden win. His read on the election is what my head says is right.
Why? Well, a couple of reasons. I think the failure of polling in 2016 has been greatly overstated, though polling in Wisconsin was too scarce that year and some pollsters did miss the size of the Trump vote. Given that pollsters would try to correct even small mistakes — their commercial viability depends on their accuracy, after all — the polls shouldn’t be too far off this time, and they’d have to be off by a significantly larger amount than they were in 2016 for Trump to win. By the numbers and common sense, Joe Biden is not as unpopular as Hillary Clinton, and if 2018 and the early-vote totals flowing in around the country are any guide, he’ll be buffeted by high turnout from an energized Democratic base. Trump, having disappointed some of his voters on COVID-19, the single biggest election-year issue, and having never approached a positive net-favorability rating, should be expected to lose.
What I Think Has Gone Wrong for Trump
How did we get here? First and foremost, Trump’s ratings on handling the coronavirus are underwater even among Republicans, and the coronavirus is at the top of many voters’ minds right now. But beyond that, Trump did not build enough on his record of economic populism. The renegotiation of NAFTA and the trade deals with China have not significantly changed the fact that we’re headed for a future in which the balance of industrial power and engineering prowess lies with Beijing. What’s more, he has become a much more conventional Republican, running on lowered corporate taxes and the repeal of Obamacare.
The mismatch between the populist Trump many voters expected when they handed him the White House in 2016 and the establishment-friendly Republican nominee asking for another four years now is one reason to anticipate a Republican calamity: It is possible that Trump’s winning coalition includes a lot of people who don’t want to vote for normal Republican senators, and that Republican senators rely on coalitions that include too many people who are repulsed by Trump.
If this is true, Republicans and Trump could drag each other down on Election Day. And in that event, it could become clear that Trump took over the GOP after descending that escalator, but Trumpism didn’t — that lots of down-ballot Republicans remain ill-equipped to capture a winning Trump-style coalition in their states. Retrospectively it could appear that the Republican House and Senate Trump enjoyed in the first two years of his term dragged him in a direction that made it harder for him to win in 2020, while his tweets and demeanor made it much harder for the party to remain competitive in congressional races.
Why I Would Still Be Worried if I Were Biden
That seems the likeliest scenario to me. The numbers all point to it. Yet people are reluctant to assure us that Joe Biden’s almost a shoo-in. Why?
Well, for starters, there’s a widespread, understandable gun-shy-ness after what happened four years ago. And there’s also something Bob Dole-ish about Biden, a sense that he’s run a timid, old man’s campaign.
What’s more, the larger political context of the moment should give anyone convinced that there’s no mass of “shy” Trump voters coming to save the president pause. If anything, the disconnect between the populace at large and our political, corporate, and media elite is growing even larger. Everyone seems to know that holding or articulating conservative or pro-Trump views is now considered gauche if not worse. They’ve seen stories about the guy in a MAGA hat who was executed by a mob. They’ve seen Democratic mayors give in to violent thugs. There’s a reason more than 5 million Americans became first-time gun owners in 2020. There’s a reason why liberal opinion outlets have run seemingly far-fetched columns about the need to “topple” Trump after the election. There’s a reason why any move toward Trump in the polls is greeted as a big harbinger rather than a regression. You get the sense that when progressives say “democracy is on the line” in this election, it’s not a warning, but a threat: If the demos doesn’t do what they want, they will cease to act within democratic means.
I hope that’s wrong. But the way that shops in New York and other major metro areas have started closing and boarding all their windows and doors is a bet too. Like all those new gun owners, they are at least hedging their bets so that if Trump wins tomorrow and the streets erupt, they’ll be protected.
I’m relatively confident that that’s not going to happen, that Biden is going to win. But like the shop-owners, I’m preparing for the opposite possibility.