If I had a nickel for every pundit, expert, spieler, and media noisemaker who has predicted that the winning margin on November 3rd will be razor-thin, I really could spend all my time at my golf club and forget about doing any work. As of this morning, RCP has Joe ahead by 51% to 42.5%; 538 says that Joe’s at 52.2%, Trump’s number is 42%. Let’s split the difference and say that Joe’s up by 10.3%.
As for the battleground states, let’s average the two surveys together again and we have Joe at 5% in Pennsylvania, in Michigan the gap is 7.6%, in Wisconsin the difference is 7.2% and in Minnesota, it’s 6.75%. Don’t forget that in these four states, Trump won three by 32,979 votes, or .002% (that’s two one-hundredths of one percent) of all votes cast. And the so-called political experts are all united in saying that Joe’s lead in the battleground states is very thin? Some thin.
Right now, RCP is saying that Trump has a tiny lead over Biden, something around 1/10th of 1 percent, in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona. In the last week, guess where Trump’s held all those bullshit rallies? I say ‘bullshit’ because in their debate, Trump claimed that he was drawing crowds of 35,000 people, when in fact the events were pulling in around 3,500 mostly unmasked fans.
Trump held events in Nevada last week, as well as in Florida. Today he’s going to North Carolina. But Joe doesn’t need Nevada, Florida, or North Carolina. He only needs Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota plus New Hampshire, where right how he enjoys a double-digit lead.
Every pollster always says that their poll results should be taken with a ‘margin of error’ of 3%. That’s fine, except for this. First, the 3-point error margin is arrived at with about as much scientific certainty as what my late mother-in-law would have referred to as hai cock and a bubba, meaning there’s nothing certain about it at all.
And even if there is some numerical validity to the 3-point spread, how come it’s only used in one way? How come none of the so-called political experts take Joe’s national lead of 10 percent and say that he may be leading by as much as 13 percent? If Joe were to rack up a national vote that was 13 percent higher than Trump, it would be the biggest landslide since Reagan’s re-election in 1984.
Just for the heck of it, let’s give Joe every battleground state where the margin either way is right now under 3 percent. Joe ends up with 373 electoral votes. Not 273, which is one vote more than he needs. Three hundred and seventy-three electoral votes. The last President to hit that number was George Bush in 1988.
Oh no. This can’t happen. There’s no chance. Says who? The same experts who keep telling us that we shouldn’t underestimate another last-minute surge for Trump?
Take a look at the details from the last New York Times/Siena poll, a national poll which is generally regarded as being the best and most accurate poll published each week. This poll has Joe leading Trump by 51% to 40%, with the Libertarians and ‘other’ candidates getting 3% and 6% still haven’t made up their minds.
But what happens if we take the 3% error margin and assign those votes to Joe? What if the 48%-47% split in Trump’s favor on who would do a better job of managing the economy was a 50%-45% margin for Joe? Forget who would do a better job dealing with the virus – Joe’s already 12 points ahead, 52% to 40%.
No survey can ever clearly catch what and how people will behave when the veritable push finally comes to the veritable shove. I can only hope that the media has more invested in making the contest appear close because otherwise everyone would tune out and the click-rate would collapse.
Let’s hope this explains why everyone keeps saying that the race is so close.
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