Trump vs. Biden: 7 (My Unvarnished Perspective)

The polls, on average, favor Trump. Although his lead isn’t statistically greater than zero, that’s okay for a Republican.

The betting odds are going against Biden. Bettors see him as much less likely to win than they did a week ago, mainly because of this passage from Special Prosecutor Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s “mishandling” of classified documents:

[A]t trial, Mr. Eiden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.

Regardless of the polls and betting odds, I believe (today) that Trump will lose the election. It will happen because of his baggage (e.g., openly vindictive personality and resulting feuds, indictments, possible convictions), which will begin to weigh more heavily as voters actually decide which way to go.

With narrow wins in a few key States, Trump could win the election even if the overall popular vote goes against him by a couple of percentage points (just as he did in 2016). That’s what happened in 2016. I attribute that win to luck and surprise. Clinton’s lead in the polls and betting markets was so large that she seemed to be a shoo-in. As a result, the Democrats didn’t gear up to manufacture enough votes to win the close races that went Trump’s way and gave him an edge in the Electoral College.

Democrats geared up with a vengeance in 2020, with a lot of help from the Covid pandemic which boosted mail-in voting — the happy hunting ground of electoral fraudsters. Democrats will build on their successes of four years ago, while the GOP will try to play catch-up ball. But the GOP will fall short because (for the most part) it will confine its vote-generating operations to legal methods. Democrats (being leftists) will pull out all the stops and officials and judges (mostly Democrats and never-Trumpers) will cover for them.

There are people like me who will vote for Trump if he’s the GOP nominee only because we can’t abide what the Democrats are doing to the country. But there aren’t enough of us, I believe, to overcome Trump’s baggage. Moreover, Democrats still have plenty of time in which to recover from last week’s Biden fiasco — and they find a way to do it, with the enthusiastic aid of most of the media. In the end Biden — or whomever the Democrats nominate — will win in a rerun of 2020.

That’s how it looks from here — as of today. Who knows what will happen in the next several months, or how it will affect the outcome of the election? I don’t.