With a little over a week until Election Day, we are almost finished with this crazy election cycle. The end is in sight, and the contours of the race seem to be getting clearer. Joe Biden has amassed a staggering national lead over President Donald Trump, and the Democratic nominee has also been maintaining leads (albeit smaller ones) in key battleground states. Barring some major shakeup of the race (something very possible in 2020), Trump will enter Election Day as a decided underdog. While he was in a similar place in 2016, his position this year is arguably far worse for a whole host of reasons. Here I will give ten reasons why a Biden victory may be the likeliest result next Tuesday, and in the coming days I will make another post listing how Trump might pull off an even bigger upset than 2016.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the number one issue on the minds of voters this year is the coronavirus pandemic. This has been a rough issue for the President, whom voters rate poorly for his response. To make matters worse for Trump, signs indicate that the pandemic is getting worse right now. New cases, hospitalizations, and deaths related to COVID-19 are all up, reinforcing the issue as number one for voters. This also counters Trump’s repeated statements that we are “rounding the turn” on the virus and may even dissuade older Trump voters from turning out on Election Day if they intended to vote in person.
Though this year and even this month have been full of twists and turns, the biggest “October Surprise” of this election cycle was undoubtedly Trump’s own COVID-19 diagnosis and recovery, an unfortunate development for a President who has repeatedly downplayed the threat of the coronavirus and decried social distancing and mask-wearing measures. Following Trump’s diagnosis, as well as his obscenely boorish behavior in the first debate, Biden’s already robust lead increased at its highest rate since his summer surge following the killing of George Floyd. The numbers have since narrowed slightly (Biden went from leading Trump by 10.5 points nationally at the surge’s peak to just over 9 points as of Oct. 25), but Trump has still not regained his pre-first debate numbers, let alone his pre-Floyd or pre-coronavirus numbers.
Biden’s lead over Trump has been far more stable than Hillary Clinton’s ever was in 2016. While Trump found himself leading nationally on occasion throughout the 2016 election year, the President has not led Biden nationally on aggregate even once throughout this entire election cycle according to RealClearPolitics, which has had a tendency to favor Pres. Trump compared to other poll aggregators. The closest he came to Biden was in mid to late February 2020, where he was trailing Biden by “only” four points nationally at a time when Biden’s campaign was arguably at its lowest point after losing Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada to Bernie Sanders. Compare that to 2016, when Trump led Hillary Clinton a couple times in mid-May and late July and came within a point of her in September and the very beginning of November of that year.
Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale earlier this year bragged about the campaign’s infrastructure and fundraising, comparing it to the Death Star from Star Wars. At the same time, Biden struggled to raise money throughout the Democratic primaries, aiding his at times flailing campaign before his landslide South Carolina victory propelled him to the nomination. Today, the roles are reversed. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party as a whole have been vastly outraising Trump and the GOP, with Biden’s most recent haul reportedly over a 100 million dollars greater than Trump’s. Trump campaign insiders have said that they went on a massive advertising spending spree in the early days of the pandemic in order to rescue the President’s image from a precipitous plunge. Clearly the spending did not work very well, or at least it has only marginally prevented an even greater polling collapse than what occurred. The result is that today the Trump campaign is struggling to afford its planned advertising for the last stretch of the campaign, with campaign manager Bill Stepien pulling previously booked television slots in battleground states like Iowa, Michigan, and Arizona because of a lack of funds. For experimental purposes, I signed up to receive text messages from both the Biden and Trump campaign this year. Biden’s campaign has been texting me this month about ways that I can vote, whether by mail or in person. The Trump campaign has been sending me five text messages a day (yes, I have been counting them), and they are all requesting money for the campaign. That is very telling of where both campaigns see themselves at this stage.
This is more anecdotal than some of my other points, but I have noticed a tremendous “Trump fatigue” set in amongst voters over the past four years, amongst both his supporters and detractors. Between his incessant tweeting, coarse rhetoric, unseemly demeanor for a President, and seemingly jumping from breaking news to breaking news under his administration, Americans are increasingly weary of this new normal of politics over the past four years. While there of course can be arguments about how much blame goes on each side for this escalation of bitterness, a consistent target of most Americans’ frustrations for this deterioration of politics is Pres. Trump himself. It might not be enough to push weary conservatives to vote for Biden, but it might push them to vote third party or not vote at all.
Kind of piggybacking off of my previous point, pollsters have found that most of the remaining undecided voters (of which there are not nearly as many as there were in this stage of 2016) are conservatives who normally vote Republican. While they agree with Trump and Republicans for the most part on policy questions, Trump’s unpresidential and frequently amoral demeanor makes it difficult for them to hold their nose and vote for him, even if they did in 2016. If the Democratic nominee was someone more liberal like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, these voters likely would have voted for Trump to avoid the alternative, based on their stated fears of extreme liberal policies in focus groups. However, Biden’s moderate profile seems to be what makes these conservatives undecided. Considering that there do not appear to be many liberals unsure of voting for Biden in this election, then that means Biden could be at a floor of support right now in polling rather than a ceiling. That is bad news for the President.
I am gonna piggyback once again because these three points are all connected. Trump and his campaign have clearly noticed their trouble in holding some conservative voters this year. That has been a state reason for Republicans’ big push to get Judge Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court. Their hope is to excite their conservative base and rally undecided conservative voters behind the President. Surveys show that conservative voters tend to care more about the issue of the Supreme Court than liberal voters, underscoring why the GOP thinks Barrett’s confirmation is so important electorally. While this point may sound like a reason for Trump to pull off an upset, I actually suspect that the move will backfire, but not because of the hypocrisy of the same Republicans who pushed back against Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016. The reason why the Supreme Court is such a big issue for conservatives is because they often feel like they are under attack from a liberalizing society. The Supreme Court is seen as a way to push back, or at least to prevent a liberal court from striking down conservative laws, particularly in the case of abortion. In two different focus groups of undecided voters from swing states (most of whom were self-described conservatives), one conducted by CNN and the other by the LA Times, a fascinating bit of logic was expressed. In each focus group, undecided conservative voters remarked that they are waiting to vote until Barrett’s confirmation vote. If she is confirmed, then these voters said they would actually be more inclined to vote for Biden. Their reasoning? Because then they would no longer need to worry about the prospect of a President Biden filling the seat. If this plays out more broadly amongst these conservative voters, then Biden may just win in a landslide.
Early voting is already underway, and the best estimates suggest that a majority of votes will be cast before Election Day itself, due to the threat of the coronavirus. Analysts wondered if this meant that turnout would jump because of more low-propensity voters casting ballots, and so far that appears to be panning out. Almost 60 million people have already cast their vote as of October 25, a staggering number considering there is still over a week to go. For reference, Donald Trump received about 63 million votes nationally in 2016. Of these early voters, almost half are registered Democrats and over 20% are Independents. Only a little over a quarter are Republicans. While this alone would not be cause for alarm for the GOP per se - surveys had shown that Republicans were more likely to cast their ballot in person on Election Day this year - the sheer number of votes cast already suggests that turnout will be quite high. The higher the turnout in early voting with this steep Democratic advantage, the tougher it will be for Republicans to muster the votes to catch up on Election Day.
A common argument in favor of Trump is that there are many voters across the country who are “shy Trump voters.” That is, they are embarrassed to tell pollsters that they support Trump, thus diminishing the President’s numbers in political surveys. This has been one theory given for Trump’s upset win in 2016, that many voters told pollsters that they were undecided when they actually intended to vote for Trump. That is certainly a plausible explanation, though it lacks hard evidence. This year, however, I highly doubt that this is in play at all. Over the past four years, Trump supporters have grown louder and more intense. The political climate is so polarized that most Republicans who previously were unsure of Trump in 2016 are now quite committed to reelecting the President. However, even greater evidence that the shy voter effect is not in play this year is in comparing presidential polls to down-ballot races. In Senate races and even more so in House races, Democratic candidates are posting big numbers in swing jurisdictions and are only closely behind in what used to be Republican strongholds. If a voter was shy about supporting Trump, I would expect them to mark themselves as undecided for the president question but then support the Republicans down-ballot. That has not been happening. In fact, down-ballot Democrats frequently post bigger leads than Biden does, a curious phenomenon that has led to a theory that pollsters may actually be underestimating Biden’s numbers this year out of fear of getting Trump’s support wrong like they did in some swing states back in 2016.
All these prior reasons lead up to this: according to the polls, Trump’s electoral path is ridiculously narrow. It is certainly more narrow than it was four years ago. If Biden wins Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, then the race is over. All three of these are looking like reaches for Trump, with Pennsylvania being the President’s best hope in my opinion. Even if Trump can manage to pick off Pennsylvania, there are 7 states that Trump won in 2016 that are really close this time around: Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas. If Trump wins PA, then Biden needs to win only one of these (or a combination of Iowa and one other) to win the presidency. Trump needs to win all of these 7 states and pick up one of Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. That’s a pretty tall task.
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