that guy in AZ Wrote:In October, 1980, I was in the audience in a fancy hotel , where the featured speaker was Louis Rukeyser. At the time, he was the genius on Wall Street.
At one point, he told the audience that he was going to tell them the names of the stocks that would double in the next year. As he rattled off the names, many people in the audience wrote them down.
Then he laughed.
He then reminded the audience that nobody, not even him, could predict what the stock market would do in a year's time.
Predicting the winner of the 2020 election is a lot like that.
A while back, the New York Times published an article showing the winner, based on whether states were solid Democrat or Republican, or "leaning" to either party. Based on their analysis, it was impossible for Trump to get more than 220 electoral votes, and it was more likely that Biden would get a landslide in the electoral college.
That crazy guy in Las Vegas, Wayne Allen Root has a different view.
"If Florida is representative of battleground states all over the country, Trump is about to win both the Florida popular vote and an electoral landslide. Democrats are panicking in Florida and all over the country."
" Trafalgar Group, which ran the most accurate state-by-state poll of 2016 by factoring in the "shy Trump voters" (people afraid to tell a stranger on the phone they support Trump), shows Trump taking the lead this week in Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Rasmussen shows Trump's approval rating at 52%, five points better than former President Barack Obama's at this same time in 2012 when he was heading for reelection victory. (1)
(MSN paints a different picture. The FiveThirtyEight presidential popularity tracker put Trump's average disapproval rating at 54.3 percent as of Thursday night, and showed his approval rating hovering at just under 43 percent. But when Gallup pollsters surveyed American voters at the same point in October 2012, they found Obama had an approval rating of 50 percent and a disapproval rating of just 45 percent—a 9 point improvement on Trump's position today.
On Friday, Poll Watch came out with its electoral map, which shows a Trump landslide of 312 electoral votes to 226."
( Trump (R) defeated former New York Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) for the presidency on November 8, 2016. Trump received 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227 electoral votes. Clinton won the national popular vote with 48.2% of the vote, while Trump received 46.1% of the vote. If you're good with math, you'll notice that Poll Watch is predicting that Trump will get more electoral college votes than he did in 2016. As my grandpappy used to say, "no f*****g way!")
"Here's what I know. Here's what my gut instinct says:
-- Nothing else matters like the poll question "Are you better off than four years ago?" Fifty-six percent of voters in one survey answered yes! That's the highest in modern history. Reagan scored 44%, and he won a 49-state landslide. Trump scored 56%.
Even more importantly, who exactly are they better off than? Common sense says they're not voting for the guy who made them feel worse (Biden) over the guy who made the feel better (Trump).
-- I know Florida is the key. If Trump wins Florida, he's in the driver's seat. And based on early-voting numbers, Florida appears to be a smashing Trump win.
-- Next in importance comes Pennsylvania. What's been happening in Pennsylvania lately? If you haven't noticed, deep-blue, Democrat-controlled Philadelphia is on fire -- rioting, looting, burning and injured cops. I guarantee the rest of Pennsylvania voters have noticed. This will push Trump over the edge in Pennsylvania. Democrats have clearly destroyed Philadelphia. Why would any sane Pennsylvanian voter want them to do the same thing to the entire country?"
https://townhall.com/columnists/wayneallynroot/2020/11/01/las-vegas-oddsmaker-announces-final-prediction-trump-electoral-landslide-coming-n2579146
(1) Contrary to what Rasmussen says, Trump' approval rating is NOT 52% . According to RealClearPolitics, his approval rating is actually 43.5%, which is a 8 points worse that Joe Biden. The same article also shows how the candidates do in individual states. Although there are some that could go either way, here is the most important statistic. Of the 11 states that Trump won in 2016, 9 of them now favor Joe Biden, and the reversal is the strongest in Michigan. Texas is the ONLY state where Trump is favored to win again. Ohio is virtually tied.
https://www.yahoo.com/elections
Now, let's listen to "the experts", as published in the utterly reliable New York Post (the same paper that just published the Hunter Biden laptop story.)
"Past presidents’ electoral success with similar ratings has been mixed. Gerald Ford, at 45 percent approval in June of 1976 (when Gallup gauged it less frequently), was defeated that November. Barack Obama, whose approval rating remained in the 40s for almost all of his re-election year before ending at 50 percent, went on to victory.
“If you look at the approval trend lines in Obama’s and Trump’s first terms, they are actually very similar,” said Helmut Norpoth, a Stony Brook University political science professor who has studied presidential popularity. “Trump’s has been a little lower, but not by much. Obama didn’t get over 50 percent in 2012 until just before the election.”
" The approval basement-dwellers both lost their re-election bids. George H.W. Bush scored a dismal 34 percent approval in October 1992; Jimmy Carter was at 37 percent in October 1980."
Norpoth’s own predictive model for presidential elections correctly identifies the winner of 25 out of the last 27 contests — including every race involving an incumbent. The forecast, based on primary results and other indicators of party cohesion, has never been thrown off by pre-election polls or news events.
The model foresees a 362-electoral-vote Trump victory.
“I guess this is the election that will really put it to the test,” Norpoth said.
https://nypost.com/article/trump-approval-ratings-compared-to-obama-presidents-throughout-history/
My personal prediction?
Although we would all love to see Trump lose in a landslide in the electoral college, I think the votes will be closer that that, if only because the Republicans are using every chance they can to cheat.
The October surprise in 2016 was Jim Comey's letter to congress 11 days before the election, which literally gave the victory to Trump.
In 2020, the October surprise was the first presidential debate. Nobody in their right mind would vote for Trump if they watched his performance that night.
The answer to the question "are you better off now than you were 4 years ago, the answer is "hell no!"
To date, 230,000 people have lost their lives to COVID-19, in large part to Trump's incompetence.
On top of that, the most recent unemployment figures show that 12.6 million people are still out of work. Although the unemployment rate of 7.9% is better than its peak of 14% in April, it does not paint a complete picture.
The unemployment rate “has a very specific meaning,” said Ernie Tedeschi, a policy economist at Evercore ISI. It only takes into account people who are out of work, available for work, and have actively looked for work in the last four weeks, as well as those on temporary layoff.
“So that doesn’t include everybody who doesn’t have a job,” he said. “If you left your job because your kids’ school is closed and you’re spending your time helping your kids with remote learning and you’re not looking for a job because of that, you would not be counted as unemployed.”
The headline unemployment rate also does not include people who have had their work hours reduced because of COVID-19, or those who have been misclassified or undercounted in the official Bureau of Labor Statistics tally, Shierholz said. If you add them in, it’s more than 30 million people.
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/10/12/how-many-people-are-unemployed-right-now/
CORRECTION : I read the post again and you noted Ohio is a dead heat.