The chattering DC elite have reached the consensus that Donald Trump’s quest for a second term is in tatters. The President is going down in flames and there is little he can do about it.
An opinion piece in the Washington Post from May read, “Republicans Have Already Decided Trump is Going to Lose.” One of CNN’s leading Trump hate-mongers, Chris Cillizza, titled a recent diatribe, “Here’s the Proof Trump Knows He’s Losing.”
There have been countless other examples declaring the race is over. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
For starters, the notion Biden has a big lead is based largely on recent polling. Consider recent polls by CNN (Biden +14), The Economist/YouGov (Biden +9), Fox News (Biden +12), and Quinnipiac (Biden +8). Anyone who sees the topline results comes to the obvious conclusion that Biden is comfortably ahead.
But, if you took a poll on what team was the most hated in all of baseball, and you took that poll behind home plate at Fenway Park, the answer would clearly be the Yankees. Essentially, that’s what is being done with these polls.
In the CNN and Quinnipiac polls, only 25% of those surveyed claimed to be Republican. Yet, in 2016, 33% of actual voters were self-identified members of the GOP. In fact, in every presidential race going back to and including the year 2000, the percentage of Republican voters never dipped below 32%. So why would anyone believe that the GOP would only count for 25% of the vote 2020?
Further, 47% of those sampled for the Fox News poll and 45% of those who participated in the Economist/YouGov poll identified as Democrats. But, in every race dating back to 2000, Democrats never made up more than 39% of the vote.
By under-sampling Republicans and over-sampling Democrats these polls are wildly off the mark. They all show Biden with a sizable lead, but they look nothing like the actual electorate from a single presidential race this century.
Polling numbers will naturally tighten after Labor Day as people start paying closer attention and pollsters begin sampling likely voters as opposed to just registered voters or adults generally. When that happens, the appearance will be that Trump is gaining momentum and Biden is blowing a once insurmountable lead that he never truly had.
Trump has also had strong primary performances. Even without opposition, Republicans are still voting for him in droves. His vote total in the Iowa Caucuses surpassed the 2012 total of Barack Obama by about 6,000 votes. In New Hampshire, his vote total was more than double Barack Obama and Bush 43’s totals during their re-election cycles.
Even in Pennsylvania’s primary, held post-coronavirus on June 2nd, more than 1 million people voted for Trump. Although the total number of Democrats outpaced the President’s final tally in the Keystone State, the Biden camp cannot be pleased that over 20% of Democrats still voted for candidates who dropped out of the race months ago.
Presidents Carter and George H.W. Bush are the only sitting presidents in the last five decades to not win a second term, and both saw very strong opposition in their primaries.
While it may sound odd considering the number of people who have lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 shutdown, President Trump also has the trajectory of the economy working in his favor.
Economists were predicting a loss of 7.5 million jobs in May. Instead, we gained 2.5 million. The stock market has largely recovered a majority of what was lost and maintains much of the significant gains made under the Trump Administration. There also remains the potential for massive Q3 GDP growth numbers, which will drop right before the November election.
Finally, thanks to the Democratic-allied media, Donald Trump is now seen as the underdog – a position he relishes. He ran in 2016 with nothing to lose and ended up shocking the “experts” who were too intellectually lazy to recognize the strength of his candidacy.
Over the next several months the Trump campaign will focus heavily on playing the underdog role and educating the American public on the real Joe Biden. He’s a lifetime member of the DC swamp elected during the Nixon administration, who spent the next 44 years in Washington supporting higher taxes, endless regulations, and writing crime bills that left families with generational destruction.
There is still a long way to go in this election cycle and anything can happen, so writing Trump’s political obituary and celebrating general election polls in June is impulsive at best.
The media is once again blinded by their own propaganda and desires. By assuming President Trump can’t win, they are writing the same headlines and making the very same mistakes of 2016.
Evan Berryhill is a lawyer, political strategist and former Capitol Hill staffer. You can follow him on Twitter @EvBerryhill.