Well, deservedly.!?!
The guy wants to win bad, but needn’t sound like a guy selling snake soil out of a traveling stage coach.
<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<><><><><>>>>>
It is reverting toward a possible Trump win:
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POLITICO
2020 ELECTIONS
Trump’s chances hinge on a polling screw-up way worse than 2016
You have to squint to see how Biden’s lead won’t hold up on Election Day.
President Donald Trump gives a campaign speech outside of Raymond James Stadium on Oct. 29, 2020, in Tampa, Fla. | Octavio Jones/Getty Image
10/30/2020 04:30 AM EDT
President Donald Trump still has a path to a second term. But it would take a polling debacle that would make 2016 look like a banner year.
According to a series of battleground state polls conducted and released in the week following the last Trump-Biden debate, the president’s chances of winning a second term now require winning states where he still trails with only days to go until voting concludes.
In most of the core swing states, Joe Biden has maintained a stable — though not overwhelming — lead over Trump in polls over the past few months, continuing into the final week of the election. Some of the state polling averages have tightened slightly since the last debate, though Biden remains consistently ahead. In three live-interview polls of Florida all released on Thursday, Biden led Trump by between 3 and 5 points.
In some of the potentially decisive states, like Pennsylvania, the polls would have to be wrong to a significant greater — greater than the errors in 2016 — for Trump to win. The latest polling averages show Biden with a 5-point lead.
It’s not impossible, but you have to squint to see how Biden’s lead won’t hold up on Election Day. Even signs that were more apparent four years ago — whether in real-time or in retrospect — are more ambiguous this year.
In 2016, the larger-than-usual share of voters who said, even in the late stages of the campaign, that they were undecided or preferred a third-party candidate was a flashing warning light that Hillary Clinton’s lead was not secure. Clinton was not well-liked, even if she was running against a historically disliked opponent. And Trump was garnering momentum in the closing two weeks of the race.
None of those is happening this year: There are generally fewer undecideds in the polls. Biden is viewed favorably by a narrow majority of voters in the country. And surveys conducted since the debate last week have not showed as large of an uptick for Trump.
“The thought that maybe things would tighten in the last week doesn’t appear to be happening,” said Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute of Public Opinion, which released a poll with NBC News on Thursday showing Biden ahead by 4 points in Florida. “I think, if anything, things are holding for Biden, or maybe even providing him an opportunity to go into some states” outside of the core battlefield.
But there are some red flags about the polls, even if it’s not clear how they would affect the outcome. More voters than in previous elections are refusing to tell pollsters for whom they’re voting — or have voted, in the case of the tens of millions of Americans who have already cast their ballots.
And in the closing days, that phenomenon is only increasing. Charles Franklin, who runs the Marquette Law School poll in Wisconsin, told National Review Online that his surveys show increasing numbers of respondents who refused to disclose their vote choice in his polls.
Similarly, Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, told POLITICO Thursday that the number of voters refusing to name their candidate “has ticked up.”
But both men said that won’t necessarily redound to Trump’s benefit. Franklin told National Review that in the Wisconsin poll he released Wednesday — Biden had a 5-point lead in the critical battleground state — that those who refused to disclose their vote preference were split evenly between those who had a favorable opinion of Biden, those who had a favorable opinion of Trump and those who had either favorable or unfavorable opinions of both men.
Murray has crunched the numbers in his survey, looking at those who refused to answer by measurements such as party registration and race. He found that it was “slightly biased toward Democrats. Meaning, a slight indicator of a ‘shy Biden’ vote, if anything. Rather than a ‘shy Trump’ vote, it seems like it could be more of a ‘shy Biden’ vote.”
Then there are Biden’s image ratings, which compare favorably with Trump’s — and Clinton’s in 2016. According to a RealClearPolitics average, Biden’s net-favorable rating is positive-6 points, meaning his average favorable rating is 6 points higher than his average unfavorable rating.
Trump’s net-favorability? Minus-13 points. In the 2016 exit poll, Clinton’s net-favorable rating was minus-12 points, while Trump’s was minus-22.
Of the six core battleground states — Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the FiveThirtyEight polling average is closer now than it was a week ago in four of them, but has only slightly tightened in each of Arizona (0.7 points closer), Florida (1.6 points), North Carolina (0.9 points) and Pennsylvania (1.2 points closer). Biden still leads by at least 2 points in each state.
The polling average in Michigan is unchanged, and Biden’s lead has grown by nearly 2 points in Wisconsin — mostly thanks to an ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows Biden with a much larger lead than other surveys.
That some people overlooked the warning signs in 2016 wasn’t the only problem with the polls. The national polls were mostly accurate, but some state polls routinely understated Trump’s support four years ago. Pollsters say many of those issues have been addressed, and national outlets have commissioned far more expensive, high-quality surveys at the state level than in 2016.
While Trump hasn’t closed enough of the gap coming out of the final debate last week, another comeback Electoral College victory by the Republican president would be the latest black mark for the polling industry. And pollsters know they’re on the hot seat over the next five days and beyond, as the votes are counted.
“One thing you know about polling for elections is there is accountability,” said Miringoff, the Marist pollster.
“There’s always that, ‘Yeah, but 2016’ in the back of everybody’s minds. But I think this is a very different election. Trump is now the incumbent. It’s a referendum on him. He has not been able to make it a choice.”
4 days until the election:
Who’s going to win? |
Tracking battleground states |
Threats to the election
THE RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE
Why Trump needs to suppress the vote to win.
How Trump could end his presidency with a wild transition.
Rick Scott opens his wallet for Trump in Florida.
Poll shows Joe Biden leading in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Florida."
© 2020 POLITICO LLC
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2020 ELECTION
Trump has signaled he won’t accept an election loss. Many of his voters agree.
Brandishing faulty or unsubstantiated claims of fraudulent ballots, the president has planted seeds of doubt about the race’s outcome if Biden wins. They appear to have taken root.
President Donald Trump has said "the only thing I worry about” is voter fraud. Many of his followers are echoing his claims.Brendan Smialowski / AFP - Getty Imag
Oct. 29, 2020, 3:33 PM EDT /
PHOENIX — President Donald Trump has refused to say he’d accept the results of the election in the event that he loses, and in the closing days of the race, some of his supporters have taken his faulty or unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud to heart.
At a packed outdoor rally in this battleground state Wednesday, Trump said the polls that show him trailing the Democratic nominee Joe Biden are “fake,” drawing boos from the crowd and raising their expectations of victory. He also said he feared voter fraud, which studies have repeatedly found to be extremely rare, and in most cases nonexistent.
“The biggest problem we have is if they cheat with the ballots. That’s my biggest problem,” he told supporters at the Phoenix Goodyear Airport this week. “That’s my only thing — that’s the only thing I worry about.”
Followers are echoing his claims.
If the president loses, “I think it will be complete voter fraud,” Tammy Byler, 54, an operations manager in Waddell, Arizona, said. “There’s so much voter fraud happening.”
Byler, who said she follows QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory, expressed confidence that Trump would win the popular and the electoral vote. She said she doesn’t believe he could legitimately get fewer votes than his opponent. “Let’s look at the crowds,” she said. “Joe Biden barely gets any.”
The sprouting seeds of doubt point to a major challenge for Biden if he gets elected and seeks to unify the country. No major U.S. presidential candidate has ever refused to accept an election outcome. Rejecting its legitimacy based on faulty theories wouldn’t change the result — states certify results, and Trump lacks the authority to stop them — but it could further split a divided nation.
“It scares me to death,” said Biden supporter Jim Bower, 62, of Glendale, Arizona, that Trump might “drag this out” well past Election Day and try to delegitimize the result if he loses.
Biden has said he would accept the result even if Trump wins. Many of the Democrat’s supporters, like Bower, agree.
“If [Trump] wins, he wins,” Bower said, before joking that if that happens, “my wife and I are moving!”
Some Trump supporters echoed incorrect or evidence-free claims made by the president recently, such as that ballots are going out that omit just Trump’s name (not true, according to PolitiFact) or being sold (no evidence for this claim) or being dumped in a river (not accurate).
“I think that there would be foul play” if Biden is declared the winner, said Jamie Kobyluck, 58, of Phoenix, who said she has already cast her absentee vote for Trump.
“If you look at pictures of the different rallies — Biden’s and Trump’s — it’s such a discrepancy. How could he have that many voters?” she said.
Biden’s rallies have been sparse and heavily socially distanced as he seeks to avoid facilitating the spread of the coronavirus, which continues to claim lives and limit economic potential. Trump has taken a different approach, packing his supporters into small spaces at concert-like rallies like the one in the Phoenix area.
Biden leads by 8.2 points in the NBC News national polling average. He also leads in most swing states likely to decide the election, albeit narrowly in some. Forecasters widely agree that he is currently the favorite but don’t entirely discount Trump’s chances of an upset.
“I don’t believe the polls will be wrong. But I will accept the results of this election should the will of the voters be different than what we hope for,” Steven Slugocki, the chairman of the Maricopa County Democratic Party, said at Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris’ rally in Phoenix.
Some Trump backers say that life would go on if he loses.
“What choice do I have?” shrugged Jeana Caywood of Saratoga, New York, who hails from Arizona and attended Trump’s rally here Wednesday while visiting.
“It’s not gonna change anything. The election will be the election,” she said. “I’m not gonna walk around angry. Not worth it.”
© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL