Donald Trump’s astonishing victory in 2016 seems to have pushed all the traditional indicators used in the analysis of a presidential race into oblivion.
As states face rising COVID-19 cases, New York and Texas states are considering reverting to a tighter containment policy, signs of economic recovery are still timid, and protests are resuming , the president should be worried about his re-election chances.
If we turn to the polls, they offer nothing very comforting. Its popularity rate has gone under 40% while Joe Biden leads nationally as well as in several pivotal states. Five months before the election, Donald Trump seems to be heading for the wall.
However, Republican organizers interviewed by POLITICO say they are confident and some of them say that the victory of the outgoing president will be overwhelming. How to explain this perception diametrically opposed to what the majority of analysts offer as perspectives? We could no longer trust the polls and the media have still not understood anything.
Even though Republican strategists close to the president show signs of nervousness when watching Donald Trump's slide, local organizers in many states say the president's backing is solid and voters remain confident. They rely on internal polls to support their claims.
Last December, I wrote a post in which I said that the 2016 polls, which had been criticized many times after the election, had been generally reliable. It has often been commentators and analysts who have forgotten that the margin of error may point to the possibility of a billionaire victory.
Although these polls have been better than what is generally claimed, Republican pollsters believe that they continue to offer a poor perception of the real chances of Donald Trump due to insufficient sampling. Democrats are said to be overrepresented at the expense of less educated whites who vote for the current president.
Moreover, these same voters would often refuse to cooperate in polls and, when they agree to answer, they would tamper with their answers to deliberately distort the data.
The Republican strategists interviewed seem convinced that the Democratic Party has been too drawn to its left, thereby moving away from the daily lives of voters in several regions. The Democratic Party would therefore be too focused on an abstract ideological discourse while the Republicans would be more pragmatic.
They offer as an example the fact that there is currently support for the slogan "defund the police" used in these protests. Far from being interpreted as a transfer of funds to related services to help communities, the slogan worries and is seen as a security threat.
I do not know if you are convinced by the Republican arguments or if you are as excited as the local organizers are, but their words only confirm the caution that we must exercise five months before the election.
Already last week I wrote that a recovery, even a temporary one, of the economy would breathe new life into Donald Trump's campaign. If you add to this factor the uneven nature of Joe Biden's performance before the harshest attacks on his record over the past forty years even begin, you quickly realize that the president cannot be counted as beaten.
The advance Joe Biden is enjoying right now is certainly good news for Democratic strategists, especially since the numbers point to interesting progress in states that we hoped to take, or little, from the Republicans. When we observe the movements in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas or Arizona, we can harbor the wildest ambitions. But ... five months is a long time in politics even if the return of Donald Trump was historic. The 2016 victory was just as much!
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