With just 50 days to go, could Trump still be re-elected?

The polls are against him, writes Andrew Buncombe, but Trump stunned most ‘experts’ four years ago. What are his chances of success?

Is Trump going to get a second term (AFP/Getty/Reuters)

Here we are once again. Four years after Americans went to the polls and watched Hillary Clinton secure 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, only for him to walk off with the prize of the presidency regardless, the nation is set for another showdown. On 3 November, barely 50 days away, supporters of the two main parties will cast ballots for either Trump or Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice-president who wanted to run in 2016, but who was pressured to step aside for Clinton by his boss. The Green Party and the Libertarians are also contesting, though nobody expects them to win.

While the faces of Trump, 74,  and 77-year-old Biden are well known, the landscape in which the election is being fought is anything but. In the autumn of 2016, unemployment stood at 4.9 per cent, down from 10 per cent at the height of the 2009 recession, and the 161,000 jobs added that October represented the 73rd consecutive month of job gains.  

Today, things feel sharply different, for several reasons. As the summer draws to an end, the coronavirus pandemic that has infected 6.4m Americans and killed 190,000 has also wrecked the economic fortunes of many.

In August, a further 1.4m jobs were added, but the unemployment rate stands at 8.5 per cent. For African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans, the figure is above 10 per cent.

And as the pandemic further exposed the systemic racism that infects much of the nation, so the killing by police in Minneapolis of an unarmed African American man called George Floyd, his neck kneeled on for almost nine minutes as witnesses watched – and recorded on their cell phones – the life squeezed from him, triggered protests across the country, and around the world.

While the most immediate demand of demonstrators was for action against the white officer now charged with murdering the 46-year-old, they went much further – a recognition of the 400 years of institutional racial discrimination that had led Floyd to be forced to be the ground at the junction of Chicago Avenue and E 38th Street in the city’s Powderhorn neighbourhood, and a vow to end it.

Most of the protests that have followed in the months since, have been peaceful. But some turned destructive: the breaking of windows and burning of cars, the arson of a police station, and the spray painting of buildings, which saw riot police take to the streets with tear gas and armoured vehicles.

Trump has tried to seize on the mayhem in Democratic-controlled cities such as Seattle, Portland and Chicago, and suggest that a vote for Biden will see such scenes spread to other communities. Biden has sought to walk a careful and purposeful path, appealing to both moderate white voters in the heartland he fears may be persuaded by Trump’s talk of anarchy, as well as progressives and supporters of Bernie Sanders.

In a recent speech in Pittsburgh, he criticised Trump for failing to condemn violence committed by his supporters, but he added: “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting.”

America not really a true democracy

If the only thing that mattered in gauging an upcoming election were national polls, then Joe Biden and the Democrats could rest easy. An average of polls collated by RealClearPolitics puts Biden at 50.5 with Trump on 43, a lead of 7.5 points. That is notably better than the advantage Clinton held in 2016, when polls on the eve of the election, put the race 46-43 in Clinton’s favour, a lead of just 3 points. The Democrats were left to reflect on their post-election grief.

America uses the so-called electoral college, in which individual states are assigned electors based on the number of senators and members of congress, coming to a total of 538. (The threshold for victory is 270.) 

It means the most populated states, such as California, have the most electoral college votes, (55), but it also means less populated states, such as Wyoming and Montana, are overly represented. All but two states, Maine and Nebraska, assign their electoral college votes on a winner takes all basis.

So a Democrat can rack up huge totals in somewhere such as California but still receive just 55 electors. Meanwhile, in somewhere such as Texas, a once solidly red state now turning purple, Democratic votes will count for nothing if a Republican scoops all 38 of its electoral college electors. Texas was last won by a Democrat in 1976.

The same goes for Republican votes in somewhere such as Minnesota, which has 10 electoral votes, and which have all gone to a Democrat since 1972, when Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern. In 2016, Clinton held on to Minnesota by less than two points, and it is at the top of the Republicans’ list of states it is seeking to flip.

Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of a dictatorship

Many have pointed out that America’s founders never wanted decisions made by a  popular vote. “Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1787. “If we incline too much to democracy we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of a dictatorship.”

Yet, it is not just a theoretical fancy that a candidate can win the popular vote and lose the electoral college. In addition to Hillary Clinton’s upset in 2016, in the 2000 race, Al Gore secured more than half-a-million more votes than George W Bush, and lost the White House by a margin of 537 votes in Florida.

A 2019 study by researchers at the University of Texas found the electoral college unfairly favoured Republicans, showing that so-called “inversions” – what befell Gore and Clinton – are more likely when a race is close. It found in one in six races, Republicans can expect to win the election, despite losing the popular vote by three points.

Many believe Trump could again lose the popular vote this year and still win by the electoral college, something he denounced on Twitter in 2012 when he believed Mitt Romney was set to suffer such indignity at the hands of Obama.  The scenario has become more likely as the race has tightened.

“I think either way it's going to be insanely tight, and I don't think Trump gets the popular vote. But I do think he could swing this thing to his advantage,” says Jeanne Zaino, professor of political science at Iona College in New York.

She says if Trump does lose the popular vote but win the electoral college – the third time in 20 years – it would be deeply troubling and an “anathema to what most people think of as a democracy”.

What is perhaps most remarkable, is that nobody believes Trump has a chance of winning the popular vote. Recently, Politico interviewed four veteran Republican campaign managers who openly conceded Trump could not hope to pull that off.  One of them, Danny Diaz, who was Jeb Bush’s campaign manager in 2016, said: “Oh, that’s a given.”

‘It’ll be an early night for the GOP if Trump doesn’t win Florida’

One of the most striking consequences of the winner-takes-all electoral college is that only a handful of states are ever meaningfully in play. A Democrat may claim they can bag Oklahoma, but the last person from the party to do so was was Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Only in a half-dozen states do both sides believe they have a chance, and it is there they pour their efforts, energy and money. Data gathered by Kantar Media this summer showed spending this cycle by both parties had been concentrated in Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona.

Other battlegrounds include North Carolina, which Trump won in 2016, and Minnesota, which Clinton took. Some Republicans believe Trump can flip New Hampshire.

Yet no state has such allure as Florida, with its 29 electoral votes. This is especially so for Trump, who is registered to vote in the state, as he seeks to build “the map” he requires to deliver 270 electoral votes. Democrats can lose Florida – they would rather not – and still pick up sufficient electors elsewhere. For instance if they were were to win / flip Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and win Arizona, they would be over the line.

Florida is seen as the political weathervane of the nation. Ever since 1960, when John F Kennedy lost there but went on to secure the presidency against Nixon, the state has been bagged by the candidate who goes on to win the White House, even if by as little as 537 votes.

An average of polls in Florida currently gives Biden a one-point advantage over Trump, statistically a tie. Other polls say the president has been losing support among older voters, who make up 20 per cent of the electorate in the state, as concern mounts over his handling of the pandemic.

Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist, believes that while the race is close and that Biden may be narrowly ahead, things could turn in Trump’s favour if the economy continues to improve, as forecasters suggest it will, and there is no new spike in Covid infections.

Yet he says Florida is essential for Trump’s reelection. “My view is this is going to come down to one or two states. I think it’s going to be really close,” he says.

“I'll say this: it could be an early night. I mean, if Trump loses Florida, it’s going to be an early night, and Biden’s going to win. But I don’t think he’s going to lose Florida.”

‘This is utterly unprecedented’

One thing that remains uncertain is how the election will be affected by the interrelated coronavirus pandemic and the struggle for racial justice.

Many have pointed out that the pandemic, which has disproportionately infected and killed people of colour, has further exposed a systemic racism that leaves minority populations less able to access healthcare, and more impacted by the economic downturn.

The president repeatedly claims he has done more for African Americans since any president since Lincoln. His critics say he has delivered long, loud racist dog whistles in his talk about law and order and a purported threat to “the suburbs”. It is the sort of “politics of fear” Nixon used successfully in 1972.

One potential clue is a poll from June published by the New York Times that gave Biden a whopping 14-point lead over Trump. That lead has now slipped to single digits, but what was particularly striking about the poll was that it showed Trump was out of step with American voters by as many as 20 points on the need to tackle the coronavirus, rather than trying to kickstart the economy.

It also showed Trump – who recently went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to talk to police officers but failed to meet the family of Jacob Blake, who was shot seven times and most likely paralysed by a white officer – was out of touch on his handling of race relations.

The poll said 61 per cent of voters disapproved of the president on this issue, compared with 33 per cent who approved. A similar number disagreed with the way he had responded to the protests that were sparked by the killing of George Floyd, when he controversially dispatched federal agents to some cities and encouraged governors to deploy the national guard.

Angela Hanks is deputy executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a Washington DC-based organisation that campaigns for economic and racial justice. She says she cannot predict the impact in terms of voting, but suggests the nation is at a point it has never been at before.

“This has exposed some really deep-seated economic issues that are of course deeply connected to race and racism in this country,” she says. “An economy that runs on exploitation and extraction is one that is not sustainable. I think you've seen that people know that needs to change.”

She says: “It feels like an understatement to say we're in an unprecedented time. But I think what we really are. This mix of people really feeling hurt, in many different ways. And that can certainly be a catalyst for change.”

You build a model to map the uncertainty

In this day and age, ought it not be possible to feed all of this information, all of this certainty, into a computer, press the button and see what it says? Actually it is. And the website 538 – named for those electoral college votes –  is one of several organisations to make forecasts based on computer modelling that seek to take account of polls, economic data and history.

It currently suggests Biden is “favoured” to win, and gives him a 74 per cent chance of doing so. By contrast, Trump would win 26 times out of 100 simulated elections. In 2016, the website gave Clinton a 71 per cent chance, compared to 28 per cent for Trump. It also ran stories headlined: “Yes, Trump has a path to victory”.

In the days and weeks after what for most people people – and perhaps Trump included – was a surprise win for Republicans, many US news organisations embarked on deep reflection and hand-wringing about how they had got things wrong. 538 was not among them, and has defended its predictions.

But managing editor Micah Cohen says it has thought about how best to present information to people. The jolt of 2016 also underscored how by focusing solely on national polls, and amid a death of reliable state polls, perceptions and expectations could be set.

That was certainly true of the Clinton campaign, which failed to dispatch its candidate to that upper midwestern state. She lost by around 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, and with it the 10 electoral college votes that pushed Trump over the victory line at around 2.30am. Soon afterwards, she called him to concede, though sent campaign manager John Podesta to peak to supporters gathered in New York, waiting until the following day to address them herself. (Biden, by contrast, has already visited Wisconsin, several times, as his running mate.)

“Right now, the best evidence we have available, which is polls, show Biden is leading by a pretty meaningful margin nationally, and healthy margins in most swing states,” says Cohen. “So if you asked me to describe the current race, the race as it stands today, I would say Biden is ahead. We’re confident about that.”

He adds: “So why does Trump have the chance? Trump has the chance because one of the best tools we have to measure the state of the race are the polls. But polls aren’t exact, or they have a margin of error. They have other types of errors.”

Cohen says there are still 50 days to go until election day, and several factors could impact the outcome – among them the economy, the pandemic and the three presidential debates that are scheduled. 

Biden is ahead. That seems really clear. But he's not ahead by so much Trump can't come back. And he's not ahead by so much that if a couple of things go Trump's way, that Trump can't win

“Biden is ahead. That seems really clear. But he's not ahead by so much Trump can't come back. And he's not ahead by so much that if a couple of things go Trump's way, that Trump can't win.”

The website’s forecasting model is famously designed by Nate Cohn, who has emerged as one of the preeminent data journalists in the country. Cohn says the forecasting is a “a systematic way to look at all the signals we're getting”.

Because of the pandemic, the company has sought to build in additional information about the economy, and access to mail-in ballots. Yet, he said while the model’s forecast might move shift every day, the coding algorithm itself was not changed.

“Nobody's sitting there, looking at the polls as they come in, and changing anything,” he says. “Once we publish the forecast, everything is programmatic. It's all an algorithm.” 

He also says this year’s model has sought to reflect better the uncertainty and the range of possible outcomes. “The whole reason to build this statistical model is to express uncertainty. It's to look at the evidence in a systematic way. And make a judgement about how uncertain the outcome,” he says.

Trump will do anything to win

America is a large country, and moreover it is many different nations at the same time. Overwhelmingly, it is conservative by the standards of say western Europe, which is one of the reasons Joe Biden, rather than Bernie Sanders, is the man taking on Trump.

Amid doubts about the ability of the Democratic socialist to win over enough swing voters in the handful of states that will determine the outcome, Democrats opted for the 77-year-old moderate.

They did so with little outwards enthusiasm. Unlike the people who show up at a Sanders rally, or one of the president’s, there is a respectful appreciation for Biden and a nostalgia for the administration he was part of.

An article published in August by ABC News suggested the so-called “enthusiasm deficit” that had been evident earlier in the year was closing. While Trump was still some way ahead, with 65 per cent of supporters expressing “strong enthusiasm” for him, Biden had increased his number of supporters expressing a similar enthusiasm to 48 per cent, up from 28 per cent in March. 

Democrats say another four years of a Trump administration would hurt the economic status of many people, put millions more at risk from Covid, and do nothing to address the existential threat of the climate crisis

Perhaps Biden got a bump in this regard after he last month named Kamala Harris as his running mate, the first woman of colour put on a ticket by a major party.

A YouGov poll also found there was less a correlation between enthusiasm for a candidate and an enthusiasm and intention to vote. It may be that many of Biden’s supporters are voting against Trump, rather than for him. But the result ought to be same.

“I think Biden’s going to win with more than 300 electoral college votes,” says Mike Fraioli, a Democratic strategist. “This has been a bad week for Trump. That story in The Atlantic  [which claimed the president had dishonoured military veterans] will hurt him badly. Especially once it was confirmed by Fox News.”

Why then are so many Democrats anxious? One answer is that Democrats are often anxious and doubtful about their candidate.

Another is that while every election is important, this one is particularly so. Democrats say another four years of a Trump administration would hurt the economic status of many people, put millions more at risk from Covid, and do nothing to address the existential threat of the climate crisis. In their eyes, his divisive rhetoric and authoritarian tendencies have already unstitched much of the fabric.

They also know that Trump cares little about playing by the rules. That he will use the White House to host his party’s convention and enjoys the fact it troubles people. They know he sought to intimidate Hillary Clinton during the debates four years ago, and will likely do so again with Biden, who often looks his age.  

They know that for the constant drop of seemingly catastrophic news, such as the revelations in Bob Woodward’s book, Rage, Trump’s base of support has remained utterly solid, and that the majority of people have already made up their minds about who he is.

They know Trump has already sought to undermine the integrity of the election, and watched his White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, refuse to confirm he would abide by the outcome. “The president has always said he'll see what happens, and make a determination in the aftermath,” she told reporters last month.

It is just as well all of this only happens once every four years.