With less than a month to go, Donald Trump is way behind in his campaign to be re-elected. He’s eight points behind nationally, trailing in almost all the key swing states, and as things stand right now, he is on track to lose. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a deluded partisan or is overcompensating, still burnt from the 2016 shock.
Our interrogation of the data in late September (Is Donald Trump toast?), left me so convinced, I went off and put some bets on high Electoral College totals for Joe Biden – mostly on 330-360 EC votes but a flutter on the two bands either side, including 360-390 votes (a candidate needs 270 to win). Ten days ago I got 12 to 1 odds, now the odds have been reduced to 8 to 1, meaning that pundits now see the chances of a huge Biden win as significantly less remote.
The polls we do have from the past few days suggest that, if anything, the President’s sojourn at Walter Reed hospital has made things even worse for his electoral chances: Biden’s lead has widened and other surveys indicate that voters think Trump could have avoided getting infected if he had taken the virus more seriously (including half of registered Republicans), and that since the President became sick, Republicans are more, not less, worried about the pandemic.
This is the context in which we have to interpret the President’s somewhat surreal communications over the past few days. First, there was the uncharacteristic note of hesitancy, that crept in on Friday and Saturday when he was moved to hospital. “Going well, I think,”was his first message, with that atypical caveat, and later, in his four minute clip from Walter Reed, he caveated again, “you don’t know, over the next few days, I guess that’s the real test.”
There was lots of talk of LOVE and the how a “bipartisan consensus was a beautiful thing to see… I won’t forget that.” By Saturday evening you could almost be forgiven for thinking he might emerge somehow softened and with a note of humility — how would “nice Trump” do with voters?
But by Sunday, the tone had changed again. Instead of ‘feel the love’, the mood was now ‘see the light.’ Along with a much-criticised drive-by, he said he had “learned a lot about Covid” by “going to school” at the hospital. Then, finally, with yesterday’s messages and his return to the White House, there was a new clarity: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
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