Two weeks out and here's where we stand. Joe Biden continues to lead Trump nationally and in all the swing states. He's even ahead of him in Georgia of all places. I know I've said it before but this race has been incredibly stable and consistent.
Bunker Boy continues to flail in his attempt to portray Biden as the second coming of Hillary Clinton. He's even gone so far as to publicly attack Anthony Fauci because Fauci refuses to play politics with people's lives. Thankfully, his act is wearing thin with a majority of voters.
Yet in spite of this, over the last few weeks, many Democrats, cognizant of what happened in 2016, have begun to experience symptoms akin to PTSD. They are waiting for the bottom to drop out and for Trump to pull off another inside straight.
I must confess I haven't exactly been immuned from these symptoms. I've been particularly short with my wife lately, more so than normal, and I've been on edge a lot. While I remain cautiously optimistic about this election, I cannot rule out the very real possibility that Trump could still win.
A piece in Politico isn't helping my anxiety any. In it, David Siders reports that Democrats are growing increasingly concerned about the early voting that's taking place in many states. They say there's no way of telling if what we're seeing portends an epic turnout election or if it's simply a case of Peter robbing Paul, i. e., voters who would've otherwise showed up at the polls on November 3, but decided to get it out of the way early.
I'm sure I don't have to remind anyone that the latter is fraught with risks. The most obvious is that Republican voters will almost certainly turn out in droves on election day. If Democrats don't have enough votes banked by then, the pathway to 270 for Trump is not only alive, but well.
That's why it is imperative that both the Biden campaign and the DNC light a fire under their voters. Based on the breakdown from the states that are reporting, for Biden and the Democrats to win they will need more than 50 percent of the vote total to be in before November 3. Using 2016 as a baseline, that would mean at least 69 million votes. The good news? So far 30 million votes have already been cast and we still have two weeks to go before election day. Any number north of 75 million I'd say is pretty damn good.
But even if we get that many early voters, we still won't know who they voted for until after the election. That's because not every registered Democrat is a guaranteed Democratic vote. Trump won by picking off a lot of disaffected blue-collar workers. Many of those workers are registered Democrats. And while Biden will get some of them back, he won't get 'em all. We also don't know how effective those Lincoln Project ads will be in encouraging disgruntled Republicans to abandon ship and vote blue. If I had to guess, I'd say for every wayward Republican Democrats snag, they will lose two of their own to Trump.
Now you know why Dems have to run up the score early. If the team you're playing against has LeBron James on its roster, and you know he's going to miss the first half, you'd better have one helluva lead going into halftime. Because he's quite capable of winning the game in the second half, especially if the polls in Wisconsin and Michigan are off, as I suspect they might be. Remember, Trump only has to hold on to one of the three Rust Belt states he captured in 2016 to win reelection. Biden can win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still lose if he doesn't flip Michigan.
But there's reason to believe that it might not be that close. That's because Trump is hemorrhaging across the board. Pick a demographic group - seniors, independents, suburban women, African Americans, Hispanics, college educated whites - and he's under water. Even with non-college whites, Biden has cut into his once sizable lead. That might explain why Trump has been visiting Georgia and Arizona. He's having to play defense in states he won handily four years ago, and that has allowed Biden to expand the electoral map.
This doesn't feel like 2016, even with all the nervous Nellies out there. As Nate Silver has pointed out several times, and I have reiterated just as many, Biden is NOT Hillary. For one thing, his approval numbers are considerably better than hers; for another, even before the pandemic hit, Trump was facing an uphill battle to win reelection. His super spreader rallies are doing more harm than good to his prospects. Astonishingly, Trump is the first president in the modern era not to crack 50 percent approval in the Gallup poll. Even Jimmy Carter managed to do that.
So, this fall, will it be deja vu or deja blue? Time will tell.
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