Does white power and treason campaign well?

Trump Vincibility Watch is a subjective and speculative estimate of the probability that Donald Trump will actually lose the 2020 elections, or in other words, suffer the consequences of his actions for the first time in his life instead of escaping from another traffic jam (see : The Mueller investigation, the Ukraine scandal, the 2016 popular vote, his six bankruptcies, and everything in between.)

Donald Trump received bad news from polls last week. No, correct that. He got a lot bad news from polls last week, as he now lags behind Joe Biden by 9.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight poll average. According to the same site, he’s even beating Biden by 5 points in Arizona, which has turned blue in a presidential election only once (during Bill Clinton’s 1996 landslide) in the past 70 years. Things are looking so bad for Trump right now that the only premise that the National Journal’s left-wing trolling expert Josh Kraushaar could come up with for his latest troll column is that Biden’s electoral coalition appears to be so large and inclusive that it could not feel compelled to do so. pander left as president.

And that?However, many Democrats who remember the night of the 2016 election wonder. Who cares about surveys and experts? A voting track, an expert consensus and 25 cents will buy you a local call on the pay phone for Edith’s Five and Dime. (These are older simulated Democrats.) Well here are some reasons to believe that this time it’s real.

1. Surveys are different. As FiveThirtyEight points out, Biden has a larger national advantage than Hillary Clinton (his, on Election Day, was 3.8 points). Her leadership is also big enough at the moment to overcome Trump’s advantage from the Electoral College. While Clinton won the popular vote thanks to her large margin of victory in places like California, Trump triumphed in the Electoral College on the basis of extremely narrow victories in the changing states. But Biden currently has clues in turning states like Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin that are outside the margin of error. As several other surveyed geeks have pointed out, the polls that predicted major Democratic wins in 2018 were generally accurate; There does not appear to be a national cohort of underground secret MAGA voters who only appear on Election Day. (With that said, as Nate Cohn noted in the New York Times, polls still didn’t predict Republican support in 2018 in some states, so if the race toughens, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that Trump could achieve surprise wins here and there. .)

2. Even Trump admits the possibility that he is losing. Historically, no one has been more convinced that polls underestimate Donald Trump’s support than Donald Trump, and it is their public position that the New York Times’ Upshot and Fox News polls showing it in double digits nationwide are “false.” and “a joke.” However, he came closer to acknowledging his general unpopularity than he ever has, in a June 26 interview with Sean Hannity, bluntly reflecting on the Fox News presenter that Biden “is going to be president because some people don’t maybe they want. ” “Politician also reports that” behind the scenes … the president has reluctantly acknowledged that he is behind, according to three people who are familiar with his thinking. “If a reality hostile to Trump is so real that Trump admits it is not false … it’s probably real. As they say.

3. He only has one approach to campaigning, and it’s not working. Trump believes he won in 2016 by ignoring “political correctness” and appealing to Americans’ instinctual beliefs. (This is, unfortunately, accurate, to the extent that he took advantage of anti-immigrant sentiment, other “white resentment” themes, anti-Hillary sexism, and the media obsession with campaign events in which he developed those themes to achieve and beat the biggest white voters in the Rust Belt.) As such, there is only one page in Trump’s playbook – saying incendiary things on Twitter and in protests. But in part why From Trump’s election, white voters with college degrees have become more liberal in the race than they were four years ago, while the Democratic nominee is an old, moderate white man who doesn’t scare moderate white men. Tweeting a video of one of his supporters shouting the phrase “white power,” as Trump did this weekend, is not a winning move in this environment. Also making it more difficult for people to attend demonstrations when standing next to a stranger can mean acquiring a deadly disease, which means that when you hold them you end up with a press coverage that emphasizes how few people want to attend your demonstrations. .

4. It is bad to be president. In 2016, the US economy was “good” by historical standards (albeit consistently uneven, racist, etc.) and Trump ran as an alternative to a status quo figure that many Americans had already irretrievably formed a negative opinion about. This year, Trump has to run on his record of being president, and he has to remain president throughout the campaign. By objective standards of whether Americans are healthy and employed, you are doing a very poor job. Meanwhile, this week, Beltway’s main news is that he appears to have ignored a report that his old friends in Russian military intelligence may have paid rewards for the deaths of US troops in Afghanistan. This apparent inaction has been criticized by other Republicans, and it has the potential to metastasize to a long-term oxygen suction scandal involving hearings and fire bombs and so on. Speaking of which:

5. The idea that your loss is so certain that you could drop out of the race, while still a long shot, is very gently emerging from the underworld from which the “buzz” is born. Things don’t always happen for completely linear and logical reasons. Sometimes someone just says something, and then someone else gets it, and eventually the idea has so much “momentum” that the people in charge think they need to do something about it, just because everyone else is doing it, and suddenly you can’t Finding a plastic straw nowhere, although banning them has only a negligible effect on the environment. (A recent political example of this is when Democrats delayed the start of Trump’s impeachment for several weeks for no other reason than suggested by a law professor and seemed like a good idea.) On Friday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough speculated that Trump could fall. out of the presidential race if you didn’t think you could win; Over the weekend, Fox Business macho man Charles Gasparino reported that anonymous “Republican Party agents” were also discussing the possibility. At this stage, all we have are wisps of hypotheticals chasing themselves in a circle, but if the polls continue to be bad, and the protests empty, and the news cycles are horrible, more experts will start talking about desertion. from Trump, and more Republican donors will worry if they should spend their money on a lost cause, and more Republican politicians will wonder if the MAGA brand is right for their future ambitions.

Maybe that won’t happen. But I would not bet against the possibility that some policy editor, somewhere, has already assigned a story about Mike Pence and Nikki Haley making “silent moves” to “distance themselves” from the president.

If elections were held tomorrow, assuming the pandemic-ravaged nation could hold elections, all available indicators say Trump would lose. But November is more than four months away, and many things can change between now and then. Theoretically, some of those things could be bad for Joe Biden instead of bad for Trump. Verdict: Right now, Trump is SLIGHTLY NOT INVINCIBLE.