Miranda Devine: Trump looking strong in the battleground states
National polls may still show Joe Biden winning Tuesday’s US presidential election, but there are lots of signs that show the race is tightening where it counts — in the battleground states, writes Miranda Devine.
NSW
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Iconic Manhattan department store Bloomingdales has been busy boarding up its front windows with plywood in anticipation of riots after Tuesday’s election. So have other luxury shops on Fifth Avenue, and across the country on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles.
It’s not much of a vote of confidence in the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. After all, it hasn’t been Republican voters out rioting all summer.
National polls still show Biden winning, some by absurd margins, but the race is tightening where it counts, in the battleground states.
The economic recovery has put the wind in Donald Trump’s sails, with staggering GDP numbers this week showing the US economy has recovered to 96.5 per cent of its pre-pandemic level.
The 33 per cent uptick reportedly is the strongest quarter since before World War II, and voters still place their hip pocket ahead of pandemic concerns.
You don’t get the impression of a Biden win, either, from the anaemic turnouts for the former VP’s occasional forays out of his basement, where a dozen people stand dutifully inside social distancing circles or in cars feebly honking their horns.
In fact, whenever Biden ventures outside Delaware, as he did this weekend, the last of the campaign, he finds exuberant flag-waving Trump supporters lining the route of his motorcade and drowning out his remarks with chants of “four more years”.
He was so exasperated with one group of vocal Trump fans tooting air horns as he spoke at the Minnesota state fairgrounds in St Paul on Friday, he insulted them as “ugly folks over there beeping the horns”.
Last week he called another group of Trump supporters “chumps”.
The insults don’t really accord with his pledge to bring back civility or his claim he’ll be the president to unite the nation.
Nor does his latest campaign ad attacking Trump, which features footage of Adolf Hitler.
If you were in any doubt that Biden’s campaign was struggling, Godwin’s law tells you his invocation of Nazis means he’s lost the argument.
A Biden win is not the impression you get from the thousands of ecstatic supporters at airport rallies the President is doing up to three times a day.
It’s also not the impression of the handful of pollsters who didn’t wind up with egg on their faces in 2016.
Fran Coombs, managing editor of Rasmussen Reports; Robert Cahaly, Trafalgar Group’s Senior Pollster; and Florida-based political consultant Albert Marko all see the numbers this year as very similar to 2016, when Hillary Clinton and Trump were neck and neck to the end. Marko, a former pollster who advises hedge funds, calculates the president will lose the popular vote but win the electoral college with 306 votes to Biden’s 232, scooping up the top battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona.
In his latest election analysis for clients this week, Marko also points to a “collapse” in Biden’s support among Latinos and black males.
“The statistics from early voting have shown a drop in the African American turnout in key Democratic stronghold counties in Michigan and Pennsylvania with further evidence of black males supporting Trump more than (they did) in 2016.
Rasmussen has polled the black vote at around 25 per cent, although Coombs warns the margin of error is high because the sample size is small.
Trafalgar also has Trump improving his black vote in Pennsylvania at 13.4 per cent and in Wisconsin at a whopping 19.6 per cent. It’s the “Fifty Cent effect”, according to Cahaly.
The rapper may have encouraged black “Shy Trump voters” after he tweeted “Vote Trump” last week with a CNBC chart showing tax rates in New York under Biden would hit 62 per cent. “F--- NEW YORK The KNICKS never win anyway,” he wrote. “I don’t care Trump doesn’t like black people 62 per cent are you out of ya f------ mind.”
Even if Trump only improves his 2016 black vote of 8 per cent nationally by a couple of points in the right places, it spells catastrophe for the Democrats, says Marko.
“I cannot stress how this, along with a collapse of non-Mexican Latino vote, makes Biden’s chances of winning this election minimal at best.”
All summer the Democratic party cynically played the race card, stoked black grievance and encouraged civil unrest which too often turned into violent riots.
What an irony if it backfires on them.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph