Yes, I Still Think Trump Will Win

Despite the Selzer Poll and the general mood of the non-Trumpite world, I am going to double down on my assessment printed in the News Letter last week that Trump is the clear favourite in the US Presidential Election. Believe me, I’ll be glad to be proven wrong. tl:dr—it’s [mostly] the economy, stupid.

Yes, Jan 6 and Dobbs are enormous drags on the GOP. Barely a quarter of Americans think the USA is on the right track and 62% think the economy is getting worse. In any other circumstances that would ensure the incumbent party lost. Abortion, 1/6/21, and Trump’s character generally are why this is even a close race.

Most surveys (e.g. Gallup, YouGov, Siena) show voters think the most important issues facing the USA are the economy including inflation, and immigration, both weak issues for Dems. Abortion, their strongest issue, comes next most of the time, but not all.

Americans view the economy negatively and the New York Times’ extensive focus group work shows many look back on the Trump economy with nostalgia, even if they are appalled by him otherwise. Inflation may have receded but prices haven’t returned to their pre-Covid levels. If you’re one of the many whose pay hasn’t kept up, life is much harder than it was under Trump. Those worst affected tend to be the lowest income women—traditionally strongly Democratic.

There aren’t many undecided voters, but obviously they are key to the outcome of this tight race. They seem to be overwhelmingly motivated by the economy and more likely to think Trump would do a better job on the subject. Harris has made up half of a once large deficit in voters’ minds on the economy, but she hasn’t caught up. Mostly, she seems to have persuaded people sympathetic to her anyway, while there are others who generally disapprove of Trump but think he’s stronger on this issue.

Immigration is an issue with which Harris was specifically tasked as VP and is perhaps the Democrats’ weakest in the electorate’s eyes. The NY Times’ focus groups find the party to be out of touch with an angry electorate open to ‘draconian’ solutions to illegal immigration. Harris and her team clearly knows she has issues on immigration, as she has pivoted sharply to the right on the issue during the campaign. But Trump’s focus on it has been relentless.

Enthusiasm gap? GOP voters have been coming out in very healthy numbers in early voting. It may be that they are just cannibalising what would otherwise have been safe election day votes, but there’s certainly no sign of lack of enthusiasm. E.g. in Nevada the GOP has an early vote lead unprecedented in recent times, according to John Ralston a brilliant analyst, the undisputed expert on Nevada election and certainly no GOP-er. Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, tell similar tales. Even in Pennsylvania, the Dem firewall of 410k votes is towards the bottom end of what they’d hope for. Women have always made somewhat more use of early voting, and across the USA and in key states, the gender gap in early voting is if anything slightly less than it was in 2020.

The shifts in voter registration in key states since the 2020 election also tend not to favour Democrats. Some of this may reflect ancestral Democrats officially registering with the party they’ve voted for for years: but I doubt that’s more than part of it. The electoral environment is really NOT how most of the media are reporting it.

The current mood reminds me of the days before the Brexit referendum when we wildly over-interpreted a genuine but ultimately insufficient late shift of undecided voters towards the Remain camp, forgetting that other hitherto undecideds were also going into the other camp. And Harris reminds me of Hubert H Humphrey, the progressive Vice President given far too little time by an unpopular President in rapid personal decline to climb out from his shadow and establish his own brand before election day.

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