IS TRUMP BEING HIS OWN WORST ENEMY?

…Trump lying again while showing a total lack of leadership

Trump ignores American’s problems, as his only concern is his re-election

There have been lots of noise for weeks that President Trump’s campaign team has been witnessing his re-election chances going into the toilet. There have been on-going reports of meetings at the White House focused on trying to right their ship.  There has been lots of noise of shake-ups in campaign staffing aimed at trying to bolster the president’s position.  But the general understanding at this time is that things are just not progressing in a positive direction for the president.

As that’s been happening, there’s also been a steady deluge of bad news for the president, including an embarrassing primary loss in North Carolina. 

Donald Trump, had endorsed Lynda Bennett in the Republican primary race for the vacant seat in North Carolina’s 11th District.  But Ms. Bennett somehow lost to another Republican, Madison Cawthorn, who’s partially paralyzed from an auto accident and he's just old enough to run for office.  At 24, Cawthorn was just barely of age to be constitutionally eligible to be running for the seat.

But that wasn’t Trump’s only problem.  Trump also had a humiliating failure to turn out supporters at his poorly attended rally in Tulsa. 

The event was supposed to mark his splashy return to the campaign trail. The news for our nation, that Trump is supposed to be leading, has been even more problematic for the president.  Of course, this time, it's also with ongoing protests over the treatment of black Americans by many US police departments.  This has spawned a renewed focus on eradicating the Jim Crow-era statues that Trump loves, that  were a tribute to the Confederacy..  This was along with a new surge in Covid-19 cases.  A surge that can’t be attributed to, as Trump always says, is due to increases in virus testing.

Along with all of that, we’ve gotten glimpses of how bad things look for Trump electorally. A few scattershot state polls offered only peeks at where Trump stood. National polls, while certainly grim for the incumbent, come with the same asterisk that was planted firmly four years ago: those national polls and electoral-vote results might differ.

However, today Joe Biden says Trump will “try to steal this election” 

We recently got some clarity on how Trump’s reelection bid looks, with a series of state polls conducted by Siena College for the New York Times. 

In six states that constituted fully a third of Trump’s electoral vote total in 2016, that being: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,

Trump now trails former vice president Joe Biden by an average of nine points. In most states, Biden’s lead is clearly outside the polling margin of error.

For those that don’t know what that means, it means that even allowing for errors in the polling, Biden would most likely, still win.

The erosion in support for Trump is centered among a few particular demographic groups. 

While younger voters are much less supportive of him than they were in 2016, that doesn’t really matter much since most voted for Hillary Clinton four years ago. 

But Trump has also continued to see his support from older voters diminish, something that was noted by the polls back in early last April.  Among voters age 65 and older, Biden now leads Trump in four of the six swing states.  This is also shown in the Times-Siena poll.  These were all the states where Trump won with those older voters four years ago.

In the Times-Siena poll, the final results are obvious that Biden is well ahead of Trump.

Trump is also losing independents in each of those states, after winning them four years ago, this is according to the latest exit polling. On average, independents moved 15 points away from Trump across the six states.  As the Times story about the poll notes, Biden’s also doing better with white voters in all six states, an important factor because of how much of the electorate in these states is white.

Biden also does well with a particular subset of respondents to the Times-Siena poll: those who say they didn’t vote in 2016, and there was a bunch of those. In each state except Michigan, Biden earns at least half of the vote from this group of voters, which makes up about 16% of respondents on average. Across all six states, Biden leads by 30 points.

There are a few ways to look at this group of respondents, each of which is valid.

The first is that many of these are people, due to their record of a lack of voting, are less likely to vote in 2020.  This is given that voting is a habit.  Those who vote infrequently are by definition, less likely to vote than those who vote frequently.  However, this may also reflect that there is a renewed interest in voting in 2020 by voters who were not interested in voting four years ago.  Some 4.4 million people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 failed to vote in 2016; if they come back to the polls and vote for Biden, it could make a significant difference.

Then, of course, there are those who might have been too young to vote in 2016, those voters who’ve turned 18 since the last election. That the youngest voters are the most heavily anti-Trump across the states is included in the Times-Siena poll.  This would agree with the poll’s results among young voters who didn’t vote four years ago.

The short version of the Times-Siena poll is that, at this moment, Trump stands to lose about a third of his electoral votes and, therefore, the White House. The longer version is that this is just one poll at one moment, months before the election itself.  Time could change all of this.

It does, however, both mirror national polling showing a broad Biden lead and other state polls (like one from Wisconsin recently released that showed a similar Biden advantage). It also reflects the obvious differences in the race, like Biden’s relative popularity compared to Hillary Clinton.

The poll shows that there were a number of people that could not bring themselves to vote for Hillary, but for today, they say they would vote for Joe Biden.

Most of all, the new polls make it clear why Trump’s team has been scrambling.

Without a significant reversal, Trump will lose. Such a reversal is certainly possible, but it’s definitely not showing as a potential, with Trump's failed dealings with the virus pandemic; with the events after George Floyd's murder; and with so many Americans losing their jobs.

The great economy over the last few years was just an extension of the Obama economy and Donald Trump had little to do with the country's successes, but he's had a lot to do with his mis-handling of the pandemic.. 

Only time, and a major change in the circumstances could allow it for Trump to win. 

But then.....stranger things have happened.

Copyright G. Ater 2020