On August 25th a little more then 2 months from Election Day Charlie Cook went ahead and said the above……
A Lot of other pundits have gotten weird these days….
They are finding ways to make things more of a horse race like cable news channels and more likely to cover their asses if things should happen that Donald Trump pull’s a Houdini and wins somehow…
But Cook points out that Donald Trump is NOT doing well with a Majority of Americans on serval things…
And while Trump HAS been trying to get the media off of those things?
They are still there and are NOT going away anytime soon in the states that count…
I think about the story in the context of this election, but not in a way that compares Trump to the king. Rather, I think about it in terms of the political analysts, pollsters, and pundits who refuse to state publicly what the data plainly show: that it is very, very unlikely Trump will win 270 electoral votes and the election.
Blame the election of 2016. Virtually everyone but the most die-hard Trump backers that year felt he would lose. Few forecasters thought it was possible for a candidate to lose the national popular vote by over 2 percentage points (nearly 3 million votes) and still win enough states to reach 270 electoral votes. You had to go back to 1876, when Samuel Tilden won the popular vote by 3 points yet lost the electoral vote 185 to 184, to see a similar scenario play out.
Between 1876 and 2016, the popular vote and the Electoral College diverged only two other times: in 1888, when Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by eight-tenths of a point but lost to Benjamin Harrison, and 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote by a half-point but George W. Bush won the electoral vote on a 537-vote win in Florida.
But there was Trump, winning Michigan by two-tenths of a point, the first Republican to win there since 1988. He repeated the feat in Pennsylvania—again not won by a Republican since George H.W. Bush in ‘88—in this case by just seven-tenths of a point. Wisconsin was another seven-tenths margin, making him the first Republican to carry that state since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
And where were the polls off in 2016? In those very states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Postelection studies revealed that, nationally, there was a slight over-sampling of whites with college degrees and a slight under-sampling of whites with less than four-year degrees. Since then, most pollsters have begun to correct for that, weighting white voters by level of educational attainment. Just this week, Pew Research released a report to guide state-level pollsters how to weight samples to correct for education.
Go through the top-line results of high-quality polls such as those from ABC News/Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal, to name just four, and you’ll find that majorities of voters do not like Trump personally, they do not approve of his handling of the job overall, and they disapprove of his entire approach to the coronavirus. When asked about personal attributes, Trump fares poorly in most surveys and trails Biden in most of the categories when the two are compared. He trails Biden by about 10 percentage points nationally in the higher-quality surveys and is behind by at least 5 points in all 20 states that Hillary Clinton carried (plus D.C.), as well as Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those states alone total 307 electoral votes.
Yes, there are things that could tilt this race: shenanigans at the Postal Service, voter confusion about how to vote, states’ inability to process and count ballots on time, to name a few. But the race has to get much closer before these can possibly make a difference in a few key states.
Trump was the candidate of change in 2016. Now, Americans are very unhappy with where the country is and how he has handled his tenure. How does an incumbent prevail in the face of this?…
I think it’s a closer race than some of the polls are showing.
I also believe that way too much is being made of the “people don’t like” Trump thing.Usually that factor would be decisive ;however, as we have seen, many Republicans don’t “like” or “approve” of him but still support him.
Indeed if that’s the numero uno issue it’s going to be a landslide for Biden.
Trump though has shown this weird ability to transcend the “like” factor.
Many people take the attitude,” Hes a rotten bastard but that’s what we need,a Rotten bastard.”
A sad yet true commentary on what our country has become.
I’m doing the next open thread on this…
It’s about something else actually…