What’s really going on here
Two things are equally true: 1) Joe Biden is overwhelmingly likely to win the election. 2) Donald Trump has a narrow chance of winning the election. The latter should be enough to scare anyone into paying close attention to the final two weeks of this election. And if it doesn’t, Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior is making for the worst kind of must-see TV.
So you’d think the media wouldn’t feel compelled to oversell the notion that Trump could win this. They’re going to get their ratings out of these next two weeks, one way or the other. Maybe they’re just trying to cover their backsides so they don’t eat crow if Trump does somehow pull it out. But regardless of the reason, we’re seeing some pretty bizarre attempts at explaining how Trump could still win.
Most of that argument centers around “The polls were wrong in 2016, so they could be wrong in 2020.” But the outcome in 2016 is actually an argument for why Biden is so likely to win in 2020. Clinton was ahead in the final polling averages by about four points. She ended up winning by two points, which was within the margin of error. It wasn’t enough to win the Electoral College. Biden is up by about ten points in the polling averages. If the polls are off by two points again, he’ll win by eight points, which would give Biden an Electoral College landslide.
The part that the media keeps leaving out is that Clinton only lost in the end because of James Comey’s letter, which completely upended the election. Without that letter, she’d be in office today. Polling analysts agree on this. Even Comey has basically admitted it and expressed regret for it. The whole thing was a historic fluke. Yes, another fluke could happen, but – as the name suggests – historic flukes tend to be rare.
The bottom line is this: the notion that the polls are somehow off by eight or ten points, and that Trump is secretly in the lead right now, and is therefore going to win no matter what, is absurd beyond words. If that notion is keeping you up at night, let go of it. Instead, consider the impact that a last minute fluke could have on this election, and how much that would suck, and how big of a lead you want Biden to have in order to guard against it. Now let’s get to work on driving voter turnout, and sleep it off after the election.
