US election 2020: Is Donald Trump going to win?
Forget the opinion polls, this election is as difficult to call as it is enthralling to watch.
Is Donald Trump going to win? Yes, that’s a highly googlable question right now, because everyone wants the answer.
We are just a few days out from a US presidential election, and the whole world is wondering: who will they choose?
And the analysis, if you haven’t noticed, is going something like this: Trump can’t possibly win but you just don’t know, do you?
No, Biden’s got in the bag, except that he won’t be elected.
Nobody wants to make an actual prediction, not after the polls shocked Hillary, and probably also Trump, last time around.
In the absence of polls, we’re left to read tea leaves. All elections have their factors: is the US at war, for example, and if so, is it winning?
Let’s go through a few of those from this year, starting with the key one: the novel coronavirus.
The US has 8.7 million active cases, including 77,000 new ones, just last Wednesday (take another bow, Victoria.) A quarter of a million people have died.
Do voters blame Trump, at least for his handling? If so, you’d have to think he’s gone for all money. But they probably don’t. They probably blame fate. And China.
Police brutality, and Black Lives Matter. Yes, they do. But it’s hard to see a new vote in the issue for the Democrats.
The Supreme Court. That goes Trump’s way. He promised to put conservatives on the court, and he’s done it, and his base will be so pleased.
Jerusalem recognised as Israel’s capital. To Australian voters, it sounds such small beer. But it’s of incalculable importance to evangelicals, who vote like you would not believe. So that, too, goes Trump’s way.
The names on the ballot. On the Republican side, there’s nothing new to see, but Democrats have reason to feel disenchanted. It wasn’t all that long ago that a million people stormed up to the White House in pink pussy hats, fired up and ready to go.
Who did the progressive party choose for the top of the ticket? The old white guy.
Never mind that they had four years to prepare themselves for this election, and to find a dynamic candidate for the progressive base to get behind, and it wasn’t like they didn’t have one, with minority credentials.
She’s on the ballot. She’s just not in first place. Obviously, the Democrats thought she’d be beaten more easily than Biden. It’s the recreant’s choice, short on faith in the electorate.
Biden is not inspiring. And if the best the Democrats can do is shrug and say, well, he’s better than Trump, well, they shouldn’t be surprised to lose.
The economy. It has taken a battering but it’s still with Trump. Most people (58 per cent) feel better off than they were four years ago, and that’s even with COVID-19 factored in.
Early polling. At the time of writing, more than 70 million Americans had already voted, either by mail or in person. Can you read anything into those tea leaves?
Democrats are hoping the early surge means something rather more significant, in the form of a desperate and urgent move towards political and social change. Others shrug and say, well, it’s just easier, innit? The lines are long on polling day and other people might have cooties, or even coronavirus.
The media. It’s been an issue since the first televised debates with the handsome John Kennedy. It’s bitter this time. Fox News has been immensely sympathetic to Trump’s agenda for a very long time. Nobody should be surprised about that.
What has been shocking is the way old-style newspapers such as The New York Times have so willingly surrendered principles of journalism to try to force Trump out. Remember the dramatic headline the Times gave to an opinion piece by “Anonymous” back in 2018? “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”
Oh so grand! And on it went, in the same style: “I work for the President, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
“Americans should know that there are adults in the room … We fully recognise what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right, even when Donald Trump won’t.”
In publishing the piece so dramatically, the Times said it was “taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay … at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration … whose job would be jeopardised by its disclosure”.
Makes it sound like they had a mature and experienced patriot on their hands, doesn’t it? A Colin Powell-style figure, deeply concerned for the state of the union.
Turns out they had a preening Twitter troll. Anonymous outed himself this week as Miles Taylor. He’s 33 now, meaning he was 29 when Trump got elected. He was not a “senior official”. He was one of 240,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, a mid-rung employee on a rather short ladder.
For the Times to offer succour, let alone cover, to a man of such vanity and self-regard was surprising then and looks stupid now. Trump called him “gutless” and that was right.
The piece was a drive-by, penned by somebody who doubtless couldn’t believe his luck when the Times agreed to splash his not particularly bold or interesting rant about how much he hates The Donald all over its pages.
Why? Because it suited them. Because they hate Trump.
Did it work? In New York, probably. He will be badly beaten there. But what about the rest of the country? CNN posted a piece on its website this week, saying: “Few people … just how short he is of the 270 electoral votes he needs.”
The piece says that Trump has only 163 votes in his camp, “which means he has to find 107 in order to win”.
Right, because maths. CNN puts five states — Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, and Florida — in the shall-we-say grabbable column. Trump won all of them in his ambuscade of the White House in 2016. If he wins them all again, he gets 85 votes, and if he does that, he’ll probably also get one from Maine’s second district, and that would bring him up to 248.
CNN says he’ll struggle from there, because “where can he possibly find the other 22 electoral votes he needs?”
Well, how about the same place he found them last time? A Trump victory in Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) or Michigan (16) wouldn’t be enough to get him over the line. But were he to win both of them, he’d be home. Arizona also has eleven electoral college votes, and Trump won it by a margin of 90,000 in 2016, so maybe he could also go for those?
All that said, the battleground state is likely to be Pennsylvania. What, not Florida? No. Because Florida is practically Trump’s home state. He expects to win it.
Pennsylvania has a juicy 20 electoral college votes. And we know how badly he wants to keep them, because he had one of his best assets there in the final week of the campaign.
There has been near relentless mocking and belittling of Melania Trump ahead this quadrennial festival. She’s a money-grabbing bubblehead; or else, she secretly hates her husband; have you seen the way she repeatedly pulls her hand away when he tries to hold it? And yet, there she was, on the stage in Pennsylvania, displaying not an ounce of eleutheromania.
“We must keep Donald in the White House so he can continue what he started, and our country can continue to flourish … Donald Trump is the man who will lead us and empower us to make that greater future together.”
The cheer was enormous, because supporters are a) disgusted by the treatment she received; and b) see a woman who was raised in communist Slovenia, and voted with her feet; whose parents and sister have since joined her in the US; who is guarded in public, and prioritises her son, Barron, over all else.
Here are some heartfelt remarks she made about her family’s recovery from COVID-19:
“It was two weeks ago when I received the diagnosis … to make matters worse, my husband, and our nation’s Commander-in-Chief, received the same news. Naturally, my mind went immediately to our son … My fear came true when he was tested again, and it came up positive … In one way I was glad the three of us went through this at the same time so we could take care of one another.”
Sceptics dismiss it as spin. But if she’s so desperate to get out; if she loathes the man as much as they say; if she never wanted to live in the White House and couldn’t believe her bad luck when he got elected — well, here was her shot at freedom, and she didn’t take it.
We all live soaked in conspiracy theories, and it can be quite entertaining. But it does make it difficult to answer the question with which we started: can Donald Trump win?
We don’t know. Only they do. They, being voters, many of whom, as above, have already spoken. Now, for political junkies, comes the truly fun part — waiting to see what they said.
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