In a great swirling ocean of polling and punditry on the US presidential election, one prediction you can take to the bank is if Trump loses Florida, he will lose the election.
There is a rush of highly regarded polling out this morning from the Sunshine State.
Marist College in a poll of 1001 registered voters has Biden five points up in Florida. The poll has a margin of error 4.4 per cent.
Monmouth University polled 509 voters and came up with the same result. Although a smaller sample size, Monmouth’s published MoE is also 4.4 per cent.
Perhaps not quite as esteemed is the Quinnipiac Poll (oh boy, did they get things wrong in 2016) which has Biden leading by three points in Florida but as the margin is within its MoE, the pollster reasonably describes Florida as too close to call.
Quinnipiac puts Biden ahead by seven in Pennsylvania, five in Ohio but also places Iowa in the too close to call basket with Trump leading by a solitary point. The one surprise from that poll is Ohio which the Real Clear Politics number crunchers list as a tie.
All three polls were conducted by telephone interview to a mix of landlines and mobile phones. Monmouth’s poll published results across gender, age, and ethnicity.
That is probably where Florida is at. It is neither red, nor blue and for the next few days at least it will remain a murky grey.
Perhaps the most important statistic is that 58 per cent of Florida’s registered voters have cast a pre-poll ballot either in person or by mail.
The battle of who gets to 270 electoral college votes and wins the presidency has reached its climax. Trump won 304 in 2016. A loss of Florida (29) still leaves him at 275 but everything would have to fall his way including wins in midwest states like Michigan where his polling places him around eight points behind.
Biden can still get to 270 if he loses Florida and the other crucial swing state, Pennsylvania but again he would have to win every state where he holds small leads and not surrender blue states from 2016. In that event, Biden would have to win Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan and hold all other blue states from 2016.
There hasn’t been a landslide win in a US presidential election for many years. There is no set definition for one but if we place the marker at 370 electoral college votes, Bill Clinton’s win in 1996 (379) qualifies but Obama’s historic win in 2008 (365) does not. For a real smashing, we have to go back to Ronald Reagan’s near obliteration of Walter Mondale in 1984 where the Gipper carried 49 states and 525 electoral college votes. George H. Bush carried 40 states and won 426 electoral college votes in 1988.
Nothing like those results will come around this time. Trump cannot win by landslide. The very best he can hope for, and it is unlikely, is an electoral college total of 321. That total presumes wins in swing states where in some cases he is up to ten points behind in polling. Biden may get into the rarefied 370 plus air but only if he wins all swing states where he holds narrow leads and wins others like Ohio and Iowa where he is either break even or a few points behind.
Texas is listed as a swing state, but I stubbornly refuse to put its 38 college votes in Biden’s pile. Trump has led in polling there almost without exception. It is true Texas is a very different place to where it was politically even 20 years ago, but it won’t be turning blue this time around.
So those are the numbers. There has been a slight narrowing in states like Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania but everywhere else the polling has been consistent. Overall, it points to a probable Biden win with anywhere between 300 and 370 electoral college votes. Trump can’t be counted out because he came from nowhere in 2016 in a result that still traumatises Democrats and pundits alike.
For the record back in 2016, I identified a pathway for a Trump victory which included his wins in Florida and the midwest. It was, I wrote, possible but not probable. Here we are again. The thing about shock results is they don’t happen all the time. Otherwise they wouldn’t be shock results.
Trump supporters cling to the view that the POTUS is an electoral magician who defies all but a handful of polls because respondents demur when asked about their support for Trump. Everyone knows what a Trump presidency looks like now. And Trump supporters are anything but shy.
His furious pace in the last week shows that if Trump is going to go down he will go down swinging. In a sense that is Trump’s problem. Lots of swings but no connections.
Never mind that 77-year-old Joe looks like he couldn’t go three rounds with Mahatma Ghandi. Trump hasn’t laid a glove on him. Not in the squared circle. Joe’s not even in the same room.
Biden was always going to be a tough matchup for Trump because Biden doesn’t evoke strong passions. He’s difficult to hate while Trump is a polarising figure. You either despise him or you love him. And only around forty per cent do hold a candle for him and that’s not a majority. Trump’s job in this campaign has been to persuade those in the middle or wavering to vote for him but instead of nailing his one strength, economic management, he babbles about Hunter Biden and missing laptop and nods to the QAnons.
His rallies are a mix of wild swings and huge misses, a weird cabaret where Trump does his little fist and hip swivel dance and then trains his eye on Hunter Biden who isn’t on the ballot. It’s a reminder of the chaos of his presidency.
In Wisconsin last week, Trump kicked off a speech with an exasperated moan that the media was obsessed with the coronavirus pandemic. “Covid, Covid, Covid,” he blabbered and then proceeded to talk about Covid for the next half an hour.
There have been 75,000 new cases of Covid every day in the US for the last week despite a decline in testing. We can safely presume that Covid management is not Trump’s strong suit and the media grabs from these rallies are unlikely to prod anyone off the fence.
An American friend living in New England told me last week, “It’s like this: Americans have been driving to work every morning and each time they see a horrible car accident -- twisted metal, shattered glass and broken humanity laid out before them. After a while, the one thing they want most of all is to drive to work and not see a car accident.”
Minds are made up and probably have been for much of the last six months. We don’t know yet what they’re saying but on the numbers we have, it looks like the removalist van will be pulling up to the White House on January 20.
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