The four-year shadow of Nov. 8, 2016
Less than a month from the election, hedged bets, qualifiers, and "to be sure" paragraphs abound. They're all, in part, a fingerprint of the unlikely outcome in 2016.
Less than a month from the election, hedged bets, qualifiers, and "to be sure" paragraphs abound. They're all, in part, a fingerprint of the unlikely outcome in 2016.
Dear readers:
聽There鈥檚 a shadow hanging over Washington. It鈥檚 the shadow of 2016.
聽Elected officials, aides, consultants, journalists 鈥� four years ago, so many political people thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. Donald Trump? President? Some election forecast models virtually wrote him off. Very few people noticed, or really believed, that underlying key polls were bouncing around and tightening as Election Day approached.
聽The memory of those misperceptions is one of the main reasons you don鈥檛 hear more whispers about what Politico鈥檚 Ryan Lizza calls 鈥淲ashington鈥檚 worst kept secret:鈥� the widespread belief that President Trump is now headed for defeat.
聽After all, the numbers facing the president are brutal. He鈥檚 losing in key polls by large margins. And those numbers are more stable than they were four years ago 鈥� or getting worse.
聽The topline is that President Trump is now 9 points behind in the FiveThirtyEight average of major national polls. In a just-released CNN survey Mr. Trump is 16 points behind Joe Biden. That鈥檚 the largest October deficit in any presidential survey in the 21st century.
聽Yes, we鈥檙e cherry-picking one poll there. But the underlying demographics are terrible for the Trump campaign. Four years ago, Mr. Trump won seniors by nine points over Hillary Clinton. The latest polls show him losing this group to Joe Biden by twenty points or more.
聽Men, overall, prefer President Trump. But women are deserting him in such numbers that barring a big change the 2020 election will feature the largest gender gap since women won the right to vote with the 19th Amendment.
聽All this means the path for a Joe Biden victory is becoming clearer. He now leads in Pennsylvania by an average of 8 points in major polls, according to the New York Times Upshot calculations. He leads in Wisconsin by 8, Minnesota by 11, and Michigan by 8. If he wins those states, as well as all the others won by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, it鈥檚 game over.
聽And yet, and yet . . . 2016! Mr. Trump鈥檚 coronavirus diagnosis might make him a more sympathetic figure. Mr. Biden might stumble in a debate. The polls might be flat wrong.
聽This uncertainty is why the FiveThirtyEight election forecast still gives Mr. Trump a 17% chance of winning, according to founding editor Nate Silver. That 鈥渋sn鈥檛 bad,鈥� he tweeted on Wednesday.
聽But the polls per se? They point to 鈥渢he biggest landslide since 1984,鈥� according to Mr. Silver.
聽Let us know what you鈥檙e thinking at csmpolitics@csmonitor.com.