The College of Virginia’s Crystal Ball lately moved seven conventional Republican strongholds — Alaska, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, South C
The College of Virginia’s Crystal Ball lately moved seven conventional Republican strongholds — Alaska, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina and Utah — into the slate of probably aggressive presidential races. Final week, Cook dinner moved Florida, historically the nation’s largest battleground prize, from a tossup to favoring Mr. Biden.
OK, I’d be remiss if I disregarded the very apparent caveat to all this forecasting. In fact, the election is way from over. And after all, the dynamics may change. (In The Atlantic, Peter Nicholas does a very good job at laying out a few of the elements that would minimize in Mr. Trump’s favor. The issues with voting are actually price watching.)
It doesn’t, nonetheless, appear as if Mr. Trump’s advisers have some grand plan to shift the present trajectory. On this second of peril, his marketing campaign is popping to a rationale lengthy invoked by anxious Democrats: However 2016!
In a briefing with reporters on Friday, Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign supervisor, Invoice Stepien, argued that a lot of the polling information was flawed, displaying slide after slide of surveys from 4 years in the past predicting Hillary Clinton would win.
“These traits are going to go unnoticed till election night time, after we’re proper they usually’re flawed,” Mr. Stepien stated.
Different Republicans imagine they’ll nonetheless flip the race round. They’re cheered by the president’s extra sober tone final week and the choice to cancel the Republican Nationwide Conference in Florida, an occasion that might have actually led to weeks of destructive media protection and presumably one other wave of infections in one of many states hit hardest by the pandemic.
“There’s an extended strategy to go. Trump’s numbers are clearly down, however they’re going to come again,” stated Scott Reed, the chief strategist for the USA Chamber of Commerce and a longtime G.O.P. strategist. “This will likely be a good race on the finish of the day.”