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I’m not going to predict who will win tomorrow’s American election because, honestly, it’s impossible to predict anything involving Donald Trump.
In 2016, I confidently told people for months before Election Day that Trump was going to achieve a surprising victory because he had been filming a lot in America that year and witnessed firsthand a fervent passion for the billionaire mogul. renegade and a visceral hatred for his opponent Hillary Clinton.
But this election is much harder to read because no one hates Joe Biden.
He’s a nice and decent guy and everyone knows about the terrible family tragedies that have ruined his life.
People may hate some of Biden’s policies, but they don’t hate HIM the way they really personally loathed Hillary.
On the contrary, many people despise Trump with an insane zeal that causes them to lie on the ground kicking and screaming on a regular basis.
He is arguably the least popular president in history with a large portion of the American public, but also one of the most popular with his supporters.
There is no middle ground with Trump.
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President Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at Richard B. Russell Airport on Sunday in Rome, Georgia.
Priscilla Confrey, Co-Director of Women for Trump of New Jersey, seen center with other supporters
When do you hear someone say, “I’m really not sure what to make of him?”
So this choice can come down to whether enough voters hate Trump to kick him out of office, not whether they believe in Biden, who has run one of the quietest, least visible, and most boring election campaigns ever.
As such, it is more of a referendum on Trump’s presidency than any vote for his opponent.
And right now, he seems to be losing that referendum – all the major polls suggest a comfortable victory for Biden, but then, as Trump forcefully reminded me several times during our phone call last weekend, the same polls predicted the same in this stage for Hillary Clinton.
That’s why pollsters have been less confident this time, moderating their data with the words ‘Trump could still win’.
It definitely could.
I would say that it is highly unlikely, but not impossible.
If you take Florida and Pennsylvania, as you assured me you will, it may be enough to push you out of line and send the world’s liberals into another anaphylactic shock.
Whether he deserves to win reelection is another matter.
I have made no secret that I found his handling of the coronavirus crisis and the murder and protests of George Floyd absolutely appalling.
But it doesn’t matter what I think, it matters what American voters think.
And if Trump loses, then it won’t be because of raging culture wars, or even race as many anticipated.
In fact, as racially inflammatory as it may seem that some of his rhetoric has been, Trump is enjoying growing support from Hispanics and even a slight increase from African Americans.
No, the most fascinating aspect of the polls right now is how mixed Trump’s support is among men and women.
It has become a battle of the sexes.
Biden’s average lead among women in recent interview polls reached 25 points a few days ago, a staggering statistic of historic proportions: no female candidate from either party has EVER led that much among women in the later stages of a campaign. electoral.
With men, though, it’s a different story: Trump leads Biden by a significant margin.
Voters hold up posters in support of Women for Trump outside the Hamilton County Board of Elections as people arrive to participate in early voting last month.
The gender gap in voting preference in 2016 was 20 points, but this time it looks more like 28 points, strongly suggesting that
Trump’s arrogant macho and trash-talking style resonates much better with men than women.
Jennifer Medina of the New York Times reported that the president’s constant boasting, especially in the way he recently responded to the coronavirus and his own battle with it, plays especially well with Mexican American men but very badly on women.
“What has alienated so many older, female and suburban voters,” he wrote, “is a key part of Trump’s appeal to these (Mexican-American) men. To them, Trump’s macho appeal is undeniable. He is energetic, rich. And, most importantly, he doesn’t apologize. In a world where at any moment someone can be attacked for saying the wrong thing, he says the wrong thing all the time and doesn’t bother to flail himself. They said they saw his challenge to medical guidance widely accepted in the face of their own illness not as a sign of poor leadership, but as that of a man doing his own research to come to his own conclusion. They see his disdain for masks as an example of his toughness, his incessant interruptions during the debate with Mr. Biden as an effective use of his power ”.
The women disagree.
In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of the women who voted for Trump in 2016 have turned their backs on him, rebuffed by the bullish, dazzling, mocking arrogance that many men seem to like so much.
I think the reason is Trump’s empathy, or rather his lack of empathy.
This has been the hardest year most Americans have endured, one in which a deadly virus has wreaked havoc across the country, killing more than 220,000 people and sparking an economic carnage that has left tens of millions in fear. for their livelihoods.
Women fear for their families; for your grandparents, your parents, your siblings and especially your children.
And they want their president to show that he understands their concern and that he cares.
But Trump doesn’t seem to understand or care.
All he has done since the pandemic broke is vastly downplaying the threat, blaming everyone else but himself and his administration for the shocking death toll in the United States, publicly denigrating the country’s top scientific and medical experts as Dr. Anthony Fauci, shedding constant cure from covid theories, flaunts all of his own CDC recommendations on masks and social distancing, and proclaims that the crisis is coming to an end as it rages more fiercely than ever with record numbers. cases registered almost every day in recent weeks.
In short, it has been a disaster during the disaster.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally at Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Park on Sunday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Just as it was a disaster in the wake of the gruesome murder of George Floyd by a callous police officer that sparked the biggest racial protests since the 1960s.
Trump’s job then was to calm the country and reach out to black Americans to tell them that he listened to them, understood their concerns, and wanted to work with them to find solutions to the shocking police brutality towards his community that has tainted America for so long. .
Instead, he tweeted that ‘when the looting begins, the shooting begins’, pouring massively divisive and inflammatory fuel on the raging fires.
And again, he showed zero empathy when necessary.
When we spoke last week, I told him that this was a major flaw that he needed to fix.
“Americans are suffering,” I said, “they need you to identify with that suffering.”
He listened, but sadly, I haven’t seen any evidence of a turn toward a more empathetic president in the last week. If anything, he has stepped up the badass act of mocking the crown in front of massive crowds of people who, for the most part, ignore masks and social distancing.
And the more she struts, the more female voters she seems to be losing.
Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Florida’s Opa-Locka Executive Airport on Sunday
Kate Rabinovitch, who voted Republican in Ohio in 2016 but will vote Democrats this time, told Britain’s Sky News: “ The George Floyd thing happened pretty much in succession to the pandemic and that was my Emotional breaking point, I only realized how dangerous Trump was in office, realizing that our children are not safe in the world we choose him to build. When Joe Biden wins this election, it will be for the women of the suburbs. ‘
Her point of view was shared by Katie Paris, founder of the girl action group ‘Red, Wine and Blue’ in Ohio, who told Sky’s US correspondent Greg Milam: ‘Many of us are moms and we are worried about the future. We see the country through the eyes of our children, in whom we try to instill good values of mutual respect, kindness in the way you treat people every day and we do not see that reflected in the President of the United States. . We can’t even have it on TV if the kids are in the room. ‘
Trump knows he has this female voter problem, which is why he’s been desperately begging ‘suburban women’ to ‘please like me.
But it may be too late for such an unedifying humiliation.
I would never discount its ability to once again confuse all the polls and skeptics. And it’s quite possible that some of the women who say they won’t vote for him turn out to be the mythical timid Trump voters who lie to pollsters.
But with a record early voting and female voters seemingly headed for the safe, calm, caring, crown-conscious, empathetic hands of Joe Biden, Trump is staring down the barrel of a humiliating single-term defeat.
And it will be truly ironic if the architects of their downfall are the women who laugh one last time at the man who once crudely boasted of being able to ‘do whatever you want’ to them.
