How Trump Could Still Win

President Donald Trump (R-FL)

All right, I know I promised I'd be back to the 2019 OVP this week, but...we're not going to be.  I'm getting WAY too anxious about the elections, and so while if you're into movies you're going to get some loving still (lots more horror movie reviews left, as well as our Star of the Month Nancy Kwan & a couple of recent festival screenings that I've done), we're going to spend the rest of the month focusing on the upcoming American election, as I have a lot more to say (including my predictions starting a week from Tuesday), and talking through it with y'all is helping me to destress.  Keeping that in mind, we're going to broach a subject that I know is triggering (for me to), but needs to at least be discussed once before I start predicting things, because while I think Joe Biden is about to be elected the 46th President of the United States, it's not a foregone conclusion.  Today, therefore, I am going to look at what it would take for Donald Trump to be elected to a second term in office.

I want to say before I begin that this article is going to focus on legal ways that he could stay in power by actually winning the election.  Perhaps the greatest failing of the media this year has been that they've raised the bar for Joe Biden to the point where he needs to win by a notable margin, not just by the bare minimum 270 electoral votes.  They have enabled Trump if the election is close to say "it's not fair-we're going to the courts" even though A) that's not how democracy works-it should be whomever wins, regardless of by how much and B) Donald Trump got into office by a bare minimum of the vote.  No, what I'm talking about here is the easiest path for Trump to hit at least 269 electoral votes.

There isn't a lot of good news for the Trump candidacy right now.  The reality is that the month has been catastrophic for the president, from a horrendous debate performance to the release of the president's tax returns to many members of his administration (including the president himself) being diagnosed with Covid-19.  All of this has resulted in an erosion of Trump's already low margins against Joe Biden.  Polls have indicated that Trump has lost ground with senior citizens, suburban voters, college-educated white voters, and white women, particularly in the Midwest.  Trump is also being drastically out-raised by Joe Biden and the Democrats when it comes to campaign donations, making it so that Trump doesn't have as robust of an advertising game in a number of states compared to Biden, not just in Clinton states like Minnesota & New Hampshire, but also in must-win states like Ohio & Iowa.  As a result of all of this, Trump's campaign is being written off by many in the media, even if they won't say it out-loud for fear of being made foolish like they were four years ago when Hillary Clinton was seen as an inevitable winner...until she wasn't.

Lost in this is that there are a couple of good pieces of news for the Trump administration, pieces that have largely been ignored.  For starters, the media has focused in places Texas & Georgia on the record amount of turnout we've seen in blue areas, but this is also true in some red areas.  Denton County in Texas, for example, is (traditionally) a Republican-stronghold, has already cast over 50% of the total ballots it cast in 2016, indicating that at least here, either there's a massive shift in the electorate or Trump is banking a lot of early votes as well.  People read way too much into early voting counts, and I think that from the record turnouts people have inferred that the Democrats are going to turnout at higher rates than Republicans, but Denton County indicates that there are bright spots for the Republicans, and that we don't know what turnout will be like on Election Day.  Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Bill Nelson in 2018 are solid examples of people who were assumed to be winning a state prior to Election Day, but Republican turnout on election day cost them their leads, and ultimately led to their defeat.  So anyone looking at early voting and indicating anything other than "lots of people are voting early" to you is not your friend.  Early voting is a good thing for campaigns (because they can bank voters early & don't have to worry about as big of a turnout mechanism on Election Day), but it is not a pundit's friend as you interpret it at your peril.  Essentially, while it's harder, it's certainly achievable to match one party's early voting in a single day.

I also have to admit that Trump's rallies are not necessarily a universally bad thing for turnout.  These rallies turnoff many voters because they are seen as "super-spreader" events, and a giant risk not only to the Trump campaign in terms of bad publicity, but in terms of health risks to potential voters before they cast their ballots.  But in past campaigns, rallies like this were a good way to keep volunteers & supporters energized about your campaign, and out there doing the work of voter outreach.  It's also worth noting that while Biden's campaign as almost completely eschewed door-knocking to turnout voters (instead favoring digital or telephone campaigns to do this), the Trump campaign has not abandoned this voter touchpoint.  It's possible this means nothing, but it's certainly going to be something that morning-after pundits point to if Trump wins a surprise.

Perhaps the biggest asset to Trump, though, is a closing of the voter registration gap in Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina, a largely uncommented on story that will look like a big miss in discussion if Trump pulls off an upset.  You can read about it more here, but essentially in these states, Republican registration has grown while Democratic has shrunk.  There are logical explanations here that don't necessarily help Trump.  For starters, in a state like North Carolina it's dangerous to over-interpret voter status since so many older voters have long been Democrats but supported Republicans at a presidential level (also the case for a state like West Virginia), and the biggest gains in voter status in all of these states has been "Unaffiliated" voters, who based on polling & demographics are more likely to support Biden's candidacy.  Plus, in some states (like Florida) Democrats are leading in registrations amongst new voters, but this shouldn't be something Democrats dismiss out-of-hand.  These aren't alarming, but they are an indication of how Trump would win-with us underestimating just how many new voters there would actually be and how many voters are actually going to switch from Trump to Biden, or from "Third Party/Didn't Vote" to Biden, the latter being a critical component of Biden's victory plan.

And obviously, there's the mail-in ballot of it all.  With more Democrats voting by mail this year, that puts a lot of pressure on the party to get their voters to vote properly via their first time filling out an absentee ballot.  In most elections the number of discarded absentee ballots wouldn't matter in terms of the actual election result, but if we're looking not at a Biden landslide, but instead at a close election where Trump & Biden are similar in numbers to four years ago when the president faced Hillary Clinton (this would, based on polling, be a significant but not impossible over-performance by Trump at the polls), these votes would matter, and could put us in a situation where the Supreme Court has to decide in Pennsylvania or Florida whether or not to count certain votes where Biden was the clear choice of the voter, but these ballots were disqualified for coming too late or not in the correct manner.

If Trump wins, at this point it's pretty clear how he would win.  Wisconsin & Michigan have been rock-solid in polls for Biden, and it's difficult for me to see an obvious way for these states to flip short of a truly seismic out-performance of the polls for Trump.  No other Clinton state seems like a target for Trump right now (Minnesota, Nevada, & New Hampshire seem in the same column as WI/MI-Lean/Likely Biden, but Biden nonetheless), so he'd need to win the rest of the states, principally Pennsylvania, Florida, and Arizona.  It's worth noting these polls have generally been either closer (FL/AZ) or more sporadic (PA), and it's obvious his campaign cares about these states more than any other (they have been heavily targeted by the campaign, and have not been lacking in ad dollars like other states).  If Trump wins, it'll happen here-if you start to see Trump pulling off victories in these three states, that sinking feeling you have that we might be getting a sequel to 2016 isn't without merit.

Other than the registration numbers (his most compelling argument, for my money), polling error, and issues with absentee balloting, I will say that Trump doesn't have a lot going for him.  The last month has been tougher on his campaign than even status quo would've been (and he needed to improve, not maintain status quo).  An October surprise could matter (the most obvious one being a health scare for Joe Biden), but considering how many people have already voted, it's questionable how much even that would matter with millions more ballots being cast in a "Biden Leads" environment.  And Biden has more than just those three paths if he has already secured WI/MI-it's entirely possible that with all of the "tipping point" conversation in a state like Pennsylvania or Florida, we're missing that polls might not be uniformly wrong in the same direction, and Ohio or Georgia could be Biden's solution if Trump starts winning half of the Big 6 (MI/WI/NC/FL/AZ/PA) states.  But the "Trump could still win" clause isn't just a line-it's still real.  Anyone dismissing him out-of-hand does so without looking at what is a clear (if narrow) path to a win.