In the final days of the 2020 presidential campaign, things do not look good for President Trump. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads by 9.2 points nationally and by 5 points in the top battleground states, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. More disturbing for Trump is that Biden is at or above 50% in eight of the nine most recent national surveys. The president is below 45% in the same number. The only recent poll that shows Biden winning less than half the national vote has Trump receiving just 40%.
The Trump campaign maintains that its internal polling shows the president tied or leading in the battleground states that will determine the winner in the Electoral College. The public polling tells a different story: Trump is as likely to lose Arizona, Georgia, or even Texas as he is to carry Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan once again. A Biden landslide is by no means guaranteed, but it is possible.
“Right now, what we are seeing in tracking [absentee ballot voters] is an increase in younger, first-time voters — some who will break for Trump but most who will break for Biden,” said Dennis Darnoi, a Republican strategist in Michigan. “Additionally, recent polls show that those who have already cast and returned their absentee ballots are breaking 69-28 for Biden. If that trend were to hold, Biden would have something like a 1.1 [million] vote lead coming into Nov. 3.”
Just a few weeks ago, GOP insiders thought some of the closely fought 2016 blue states were in play. “Law and order is a big [issue] in New Hampshire, as the Democrat candidate for governor has recently pushed to commute the sentence of a convicted cop killer,” said a Granite State Republican strategist. “Additionally, our economy is coming back, and the COVID situation has been tame here compared to other areas of the country. New Hampshire voters give Trump credit in the areas of law and order and the economy. This will serve him well on Election Day.”
But the urban riots have since receded as a campaign issue, and the coronavirus has come roaring back to the top of many voters’ priorities list. Biden’s lead has also been steady since February. Were it not for Trump’s unpredictability and passionate base — enthusiasm is one area in which the president leads in a number of polls — the race would feel like a plod toward an inevitable Democratic victory, much like 1996 or 2008. Once-optimistic Trump insiders are starting to sound glum.
What has gone wrong for the improbable political force of nature who barreled through a field of 16 Republican presidential candidates, many of them impressive, and upset Hillary Clinton just four years ago? Democratic strategist Spencer Critchley, author of Patriots of Two Nations: Why Trump Was Inevitable and What Happens Next, said that victory required a number of “black swan events.”
“Trump won in 2016 due to an incredible collection of factors,” Critchley said. “One of them was that he happened to win 77,000 [more] votes or so in three Midwestern battleground states.” That is, Trump was able to thread the needle in ways that have so far eluded him in 2020.
The most obvious change is that Trump is the incumbent during a pandemic that has killed more than 215,000 people in the United States and upended the economic boom that was always his best case for a second term. Even when unemployment stood at 3.5%, with record lows for black and Hispanic workers, Trump’s job approval rating rarely topped 50%. Without the robust economy, a small majority has consistently disapproved of Trump’s performance in office, and they appear to be coalescing around Biden.
“What binds the Biden coalition — Republicans, independents, centrist/moderate Democrats, the progressive Left or extreme Left, Sanders/AOC Democrats — what holds all of this broad coalition together is the absolute rebuke and repudiation of Donald Trump,” said Moe Vela, a former top Biden aide. “He is the glue that holds this coalition together.”
Trump has tried mightily to change the subject from the coronavirus to the economic reopening. Over the summer, he staked his reelection on ending the lockdowns that slowed the spread of the virus only at the cost of millions of jobs. The bet was that this would look better in October than in July. The economy has certainly rebounded some, but not consistently across the country and not to the point where Trump can convincingly claim vindication. Instead, Trump’s desire to discuss the economy, where he does lead in most polls, has contributed to the impression that his pandemic management has failed.
Circumstances have also been unkind to Trump’s efforts to turn the page on the coronavirus. He contracted the virus himself and ended up spending a few days at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. There was an outbreak at the White House that afflicted the first lady, Trump’s youngest son, the press secretary, the campaign manager, and other top aides. It followed a series of events where little social distancing was practiced and relatively few people wore masks. This served to reinforce the Democrats’ argument that Trump was reckless in the face of a deadly illness.
Trump has tried to turn this around to his advantage as well: He returned to the White House and the campaign trail boasting of how he had beaten the virus. “Feeling really good!” Trump tweeted as he left the hospital. “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” The public doesn’t seem convinced. According to a Washington Examiner/YouGov poll, 40% thought Trump looked weaker after his COVID-19 infection, to only 24% who said he looked energized.
The coronavirus contributed to the cancellation of the second presidential debate, after Trump refused to participate in a virtual event. It led to a vice presidential debate in which the candidates sat more than 12 feet away from each other and behind plexiglass dividers. Stark reminders of the pandemic keep intruding on the campaign in ways that Trump cannot avoid.
In 2016, many disgruntled left-wing Democrats who had supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries stayed home, voted third-party (especially for Green Party nominee Jill Stein), or even cast ballots for Trump. Disaffected Republicans also voted third-party in large numbers. The Libertarian Party ticket, featuring two prominent former Republican governors, received more than 4 million votes.
Four years later, both the Libertarian and Green parties have less well-known nominees who appear likely to garner a much smaller share of the vote. The Greens have also struggled with ballot access. Kanye West’s celebrity campaign, aided by Republican operatives, has largely fizzled. The 51% or so of the electorate who dislike Trump are voting for Biden, presenting daunting arithmetic for the president.
In the previous presidential election, voters who disliked both major party candidates broke heavily for Trump when they did not go third-party. This year, they appear to be voting for Biden. In a Monmouth University poll conducted earlier this year, for example, such voters preferred Biden 59% to 18%, an eye-popping 41-point margin.
Senior citizens voted for Trump in 2016. This year, they have gravitated heavily toward Biden. Some of this is due to the pandemic — older people are at greater risk of dying from the coronavirus and, as retirees, are less in need of the jobs that would be created by economic reopening. Some of it has to do with Trump’s tweets and temperament. Trump simply does not look or behave the way these voters have come to expect of a president. And as Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini has pointed out, some of it is because seniors who voted for Trump four years ago have been replaced by a new, more college-educated group of seniors. College-educated suburban whites are the demographic that has turned most sharply against the GOP under Trump, especially women.
While Clinton led during most of the 2016 campaign, she did not enjoy the same consistent advantage that Biden has possessed this year. She had bad news cycles during which her lead would shrink or evaporate. The James Comey letter suggesting the federal investigation into her State Department emails was being reopened came out closer to the election than the lewd Trump Access Hollywood tape.
With the arguable exception of the headlines about his “court-packing” evasiveness, Biden has never really had a negative news cycle during this campaign. Other than when he dispatched Sanders in the Democratic primaries and then later accepted the nomination at a mostly virtual convention, he has never really dominated the headlines at all. Once again, the focus has been almost entirely on Trump, but this time mostly to the former reality TV star’s detriment.
The media have certainly done their part to maintain this Trump-unfriendly balance. Some cable news networks regret the ratings-driven coverage they aired of Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies and are trying to rectify that with wall-to-wall negative coverage now. Many reporters believe that the way that they or their colleagues covered Trump four years ago, as an interesting curiosity, versus Clinton, as the likely future president, biased the reporting against the former secretary of state. They do not intend to allow this to happen again. When New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman shared a New York Post story that appeared to implicate Biden at least partially in some of his son Hunter’s questionable overseas business dealings, she was widely condemned. Twitter restricted its users’ ability to circulate the article on its platform.
In short, nearly everything that went right for Trump in 2016 has gone wrong this year, and he has dwindling opportunities to alter the dynamics of the campaign. But there are a few exceptions. Trump’s record — cutting taxes, reducing regulations, curbing illegal immigration, crushing the Islamic State, appointing conservative judges (perhaps soon to include a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court), and conducting successful Middle East diplomacy — has reassured at least some conservatives who were wary of him when he first ran.
Never Trump operatives have largely relocated to the Democratic Party, and while some may find the 2024 GOP field more to their liking, it will be difficult for the Lincoln Project types to come back into the Republican fold. Never Trumpers who have remained Republicans have largely been marginalized, though they remain disproportionately represented on newspaper op-ed pages. Social conservatives, who largely backed other candidates in the 2016 primaries, now see Trump as one of them. The one significant exception to this general rule is Mormon voters, who could sway a few swing states such as Arizona.
Yet despite all the headwinds Trump faces, few are willing to count him out entirely. Much of this has to do with 2016, when some of the polls were wrong and the media’s analysis of them was even worse. “In 2016, emotion infiltrated analysis. Polling had the race as a 3-4 point race nationally, but emotionally a lot of people could not shake the feeling there was no way America would elect Trump and discounted [the] chance it could happen,” tweeted the Washington Examiner’s Kristen Soltis Anderson. “In 2020, emotion is infiltrating analysis the other direction. The polling is clearer and more consistent, with Biden up by 8 in the averages. But emotionally, a lot of people remember the feeling of shock in 2016 and don’t want to repeat it.”
A few pollsters show a closer national race, although the most reputable among them, Rasmussen, now shows Trump behind by margins similar to other national surveys. The Trafalgar Group believes it has better identified “shy” or “hidden” Trump voters than the competition. The Democracy Institute has garnered headlines with polls showing Trump ahead. While wildly out of step with the vast majority of polling, 2016 makes some political observers more reluctant to dismiss them, and even some Democrats concede the race could be closer than the conventional wisdom suggests.
“I think this race is going to be close, I think it is going to be closer than people realize,” Vela said. “I attribute that to the secret Trump voter who is embarrassed to tell anyone they are voting for him.”
Due to the pandemic, few reporters have spent much time on the campaign trail. Campaign travel was a major indicator to many journalists that the battleground state polls were missing something, and not as many reporters are doing it this time around. Trump remains a bigger draw at public events than Biden. It is at least theoretically possible that this enthusiasm gap, plus differing coronavirus risk assessments, will also show up on Election Day in ways that redound to Trump’s benefit.
“Everything we’ve heard anecdotally is that Democrats will crawl across broken glass to vote against Trump,” Critchley said, pointing to early voting. The 2018 midterm elections largely went as the pollsters predicted, and there were no major polling misfires in the primaries and special elections this year. But it is possible that some voters, especially working-class white ones, will turn out for Trump at higher levels than for Republicans in down-ballot races. Something similar happened with Barack Obama in 2012, despite terrible midterm elections before and after, causing Gallup to understate his reelection chances and Republicans to believe the other polls were “skewed.”
Gallup has given us another surprise number this year: 56% say they are better off than they were four years ago. That would appear to be good news for Trump, and it was better than the share of respondents saying the same at this point during Obama’s reelection campaign. Ronald Reagan won two terms in the White House by asking this question, the second a 49-state landslide.
Still, the betting markets overwhelmingly favor Biden, and for good reason. If you are a betting man, Trump’s reelection looks like a risky gamble right now.
W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner‘s politics editor.
