Trump vs. Biden: is the incumbent underdog gonna make it, again?

I believe Trump’s gonna win the re-election, polls notwithstanding.

A quick recap: last time around, I was one of the first few people to anticipate Trump’s victory, just days after he entered the 2015 Primary race. Being Italian I couldn’t vote, but -next best thing- I at least bet on the outcome (they had to pay my bet 31-to-1). I gave some of the reasons in advance, although I postponed indefinitely explaining the real, deepest motivation for my conviction.

This time I’m really not 100% convinced: I still have some limited respect for the sense of decency of some of the mainstream pollsters, despite the fact that after the 2016 victory I berated them with gusto, citing hard facts and pointing out the flaws and agendas behind most (publicly disseminated) polls.
The thing is, pollsters like Nate Silver genuinely believe in what they do and seem quite convinced that Biden is way better positioned now than Hillary Clinton was.
Despite some predictable manipulations and their deeply ingrained bias, there must be a kernel of truth to this.

 

After all, there are a few key ingredients in Old Joe’s favor.

  Without Covid-19 Trump was a shoo-in, but it’s hard to be the incumbent when thousands die, the situation seems out of control and the economy is in shambles. Many in the public have no standard to compare his performance to, therefore go for an abstract ideal and find him wanting; Trump himself has some flaws that became apparent in this situation (downplaying the black swan event that upended his plans), and Democrats attacked that easy target like the proverbial sharks that sense blood in the water.
  Trump was a newcomer in 2016; now many undecided voters have endured a 4-year bombardment of attacks against his figure. Propaganda works.
  Hillary Clinton was well-known and universally disdained (although I argued if people really knew her nastiness and shenanigans she would have been utterly destroyed), while most middle-of-the-road voters don’t have a strong opinion on Biden.
I don’t think you could find someone who got to know Biden well and genuinely trusts or even likes him. But Biden became a household name while remaining in Obama’s shadow: most people think they are familiar with him but don’t really know much about him. That’s the point.
There’s no doubt in my mind a majority of the votes cast for Biden are from low-information voters.
Plus, despite the feminist talking points, women prefer to vote for an old man than for a woman, especially one like Hillary.
  Last but not least, with the unprecedented amount of votes by mail and ballot counting expected to take many days, a number of opportunities arise for Democrat operatives to try and manipulate the results in key states like Pennsylvania, where a few thousand votes could mean everything.
And please, spare me the lawyer-talk: you know perfectly well that’s a problem only with the Democrats, that have the motives and opportunity to steal an election, and -moreover- overwhelmingly feel they are on the side of good by definition, therefore anything goes and they could cheat in good conscience: to them, their noble goals are way more important than the law.
Heck, plenty of cases of voter fraud have been already proven -to anyone caring to check- thanks to hidden cam investigations by Project Veritas!

 

Hunches

On the other hand I must say that, despite the contradictory signals coming at me from the United States (I cannot verify the situation on the ground and of course everybody reporting has a bias), it looks like the polls are wrong and there’s much more momentum than last time behind the MAGA vote.
But I won’t pretend to be able to predict the future this time.
It’s just that I trust Americans and you cannot really crown a bumbling old man that gathers tens of people at his rallies, delivers only vague platitudes and sounds inauthentic and out of place. So, I’m definitely going for a Trump victory. And he could even be able to obtain an even more resounding victory than expected, nullifying the specter of an undecided election, replete with recounts and long legal battles.

 

In September 2016 I was on the East Coast and didn’t see many yard signs (a few for Trump, only one for Hillary in a week of driving around) but in Florida I noticed some radio and billboard support for our Orange Man associated with local candidates with a Spanish name; this made me a bit more confident of the crucial Florida result. More significantly, I overheard a gal in a restaurant in Georgetown (of all places!) vehemently protesting “What do I owe to the party?” because she was discussing with her friend her decision to vote for the unmentionable guy.
Of course these anecdotes amount to very little. But there’s a spirit of rebellion that I refuse to think has been conquered, in fact it should have grown stronger. And I think I’ll believe Dan Bongino’s account (I lost the link, sorry), finding even more enthusiasm in Florida for the Donald than in 2016 (seeing lots of Trump signs in front of houses that weren’t targeted for campaigning because they weren’t on the lists of registered Republican voters).

 

Trump’s strengths

There are many positives going for what I dubbed “the incumbent underdog” (treated as the outsider that still has to prove his ability to win, despite being the President):

  Latino and Black vote for Trump is projected to be way up nationally, while the new Republican voter registrations were outpacing the Dems in key states.

I don’t believe it’s lost on people: the President was surprisingly effective in creating and repatriating jobs, giving the American economy a boost. Covid-19 cannot cancel that. And you usually win on the economy. Plus the pandemic clearly demonstrated the flaws of the globalist system that Trump successfully began to dismantle. Bonus points: both fighting the World-without-borders and increasing manufacturing jobs were battles that he won while all the experts insisted that was impossible.

Most normal people eventually get frustrated, then angry, at the sight of riots, looting, vandalism and lawlessness dominating entire cities for months. The Left won’t ever dare criticize them, but American families overwhelmingly feel enough is enough.

I believe the number of people that don’t trust the mainstream media has continued to increase.

Biden is a very weak candidate, one that represents a clear sign the party has in essence given up trying, and many voters feel that.
Frankly there’s much more to be said about this particular aspect, and I’ll do it in a future article.

 

Don’t let predictions mesmerize you

Therefore I’m now thinking the crux of the problem here is: how many Trump-supporting respondents chose to hide their intention from the pollsters (the so-called shy voters), or to mess with the results, so that current polls are even more unreliable than in the past?
I bet there are a lot.

That’s why the pollsters could bomb even more spectacularly this time.

But wait, there’s one polling institution, Trafalgar Group, that was among the very few that got it right in 2016, and they’re predicting a Trump re-election!
I was impressed by Trafalgar’s Robert Cahaly performance in interviews, bowtie notwithstanding. He may be on to something, especially on the shy vote. But he’s clearly biased in the opposite direction of the rest.

Here’s a sobering thought: maybe the real outcome escapes them, and the plain reality could be that pollsters always favor the Democrats (except Trafalgar and maybe a few others), while alternative media voices go for the Republicans.
Therefore if D wins, the pollsters as a consequence were “accurate”, while if R wins, the alternative media and the Lone Poll Ranger were magically “right”.

All in all, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the result will solidify in significantly less than 24 hours in favor of Trump. But it’s a guarantee that in many states the vote counting operations will be painfully slow, waiting for days for unspecified amounts of votes by mail that may be overwhelmingly for Biden and become as large as deemed necessary to flip the state

As I highlighted in my previous article, this is the last stand, the fundamental battlefield where corruption should be defeated.

Side note: the news on Election Day will all be about long queues at the polls. The following day, sadly, vandalism and hatred.

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