I’ve lost a lot of respect for the BBC as a political commentator in recent years, but their latest article on how Trump “could still win” is a classic. It requires some extreme suspension of disbelief or outright magical thinking. If this is the best the media “horse race” promoters can do, Biden is in a very good place.
So what are Anthony Zurcher’s five thoughts on how Trump could still win?
Another October surprise
Four years ago, just 11 days before the election, FBI Director James Comey disclosed that his agency was reopening an investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. For a week, related stories dominated the headlines and gave the Trump campaign room to breathe.
With just over two weeks before polls close in 2020, a similar seismic political event might be enough to propel Trump to victory.
It is a mark of how weak the arguments, and the article, are that their starting point is a deus ex machina.
There is nothing that the GOP could pull out of their asses now that is going to move the dial one iota. Opinions of Trump and Biden are baked in. Biden is a completely known quantity. Any October Surprise they try to pull will be disbelieved. Moreover, it overlooks the extent to which what people are voting for is simply “not Trump”.
The polls are wrong
Practically since Biden secured the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, national polls have given him a steady lead over Trump. Even in key swing states, which have shown a tighter race, Biden has demonstrated a consistent lead frequently outside the margin of error.
As 2016 demonstrated, however, national leads are irrelevant and state-level polls can miss the mark.
Predicting what a presidential electorate will look like - that is, who will actually show up to cast a ballot - is a challenge in every election, and some pollsters got it wrong last time, undercounting the number of white, non-college-educated voters who would turn out for Trump.
“Unskewing” the polls has a long and sad history. As others have pointed out, the polls were not as wrong in terms of vote share as people have subsequently made out. Important factors such as the number of undecideds and their tendency to break against the incumbent party work against Trump this time. The undersampling of white voters without a college education has been corrected for. Sure, every single poll COULD be at least five percentage points wrong, but the chances of that are less than the chances of Trump telling no lies between now and election day.
In this section, the BBC goes on to say:
Many Americans, for instance, are planning to vote by mail for the first time. Republicans are already promising to aggressively challenge mail-in ballots to prevent what they say could be the potential for widespread fraud - something Democrats have said is really an effort at voter suppression.
So we have moved on from the polls being wrong to the Republicans cheating. Far from impossible, we know they will try it, and it has to be guarded against. I am confident Biden is doing that. (Oh, and thanks, Zurcher, for replacing facts with “he said, she said”.)
If voters fill out their forms incorrectly or do not follow proper procedure, or there is delay or disruption in mail delivery, it could lead to otherwise valid ballots being discarded. Understaffed or limited in-person polling places could also make it more difficult to vote on election day, discouraging Americans who had been considered by pollsters to be "likely voters."
While this is true, it will equally impact on postal votes from Republicans — perhaps more so given the differing average levels of education and intelligence. Problems on polling day are likely to discourage demoralised elderly Republican voters as much if not more than the anti-Trump coalition. Even though it is likely that Democrats may be slightly disproportionately impacted by this phenomenon, the idea that this could offset a 10% Biden lead in the national vote seems like extreme wishful thinking.
A debate turnaround
Trump missed an opportunity to change his first-debate impressions when he backed out of the second scheduled debate because it had been switched from in-person to a "virtual format". He'll have one more chance on the big stage next Thursday and will have to make it count.
If Trump presents a calmer, more presidential demeanour and Biden comes unglued or has some particularly dramatic gaffe, the balance of the race could possibly tilt in Trump's favour.
And if my cat had feathers, it would be a bird*. Why do pundits refuse to get that making comments like this just destroys their credibility? You can no more expect Trump to be calm and Presidential than you can expect the sun to suddenly decide to rise in the West one morning.
A swing state sweep
Even with polls showing an advantage for Biden, there are enough states where Trump is ahead or within the margin of error that - if things break just the right way for the president - the Electoral College arithmetic could work out for him.
I’d love to know what polls they are talking about — they don’t do their readers the courtesy of linking to them — because the polls I have seen say that if Biden takes just the states where his lead is above the MoE, he is already at least close to and probably over 270. The BBC article also makes the usual mistake of thinking that an MoE means that any result within that range is equally likely.
Moreover, when multiple polls with varying methodologies are all telling broadly the same story, rather than giving results some of which favour Trump and others of which favour Biden, the idea that the actual current position is questionable is a non-starter. Biden is winning. Full stop. That still needs to be converted into actual votes, but the argument that actually Trump might be winning and the polls are all showing the same random sampling error (as opposed to methodological errors like the undersampling of white voters without degrees) is nonsensical.
A Biden fumble
Biden's electoral coalition is a hodgepodge of suburban moderates, disaffected Republicans, traditional working-class Democrats, ethnic minorities and liberal true believers. That's a lot of different and conflicting interests that could be stirred to anger if he gives them reason to.
Then there's the chance that, under the fatigue of the campaign trail, Biden shows his age and again raises concern about whether he is up to the task of being president. If he does, the Trump campaign will be poised to pounce.
That was my fear about six months ago. But has Zurcher seen one single thing in this election in the past six months? He ignores the fact that the most powerful driving force in the Biden coalition is “get rid of Trump at all costs”. If you want to talk about questions as to who is more physically and mentally fit to serve, has Zurcher not noticed that there are genuine questions as to whether Trump will still be alive on election day? Or that Kamala Harris is a widely liked and respected Plan B if anything does happen to Biden?
Not only that, if, heaven forbid, something awful did happen to Biden, you just know that Trump’s response would be so obnoxious that all he would achieve is to drive his vote down another couple of points.
Articles like this irritate the hell out of me, because they show such gross ignorance on the part of people who are being paid good money to inform the public. But they also cheer me up, because if these are the lengths people have to go to in order to suggest Trump is still in with a shout, Biden is in a very strong place.
*Update: A couple of posters have said that my use of the phrase “if my aunt had testicles she would be my uncle” comes across as transphobic. It is not my intention to offend anyone, so I have amended the phraseology.