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发帖数: 2047 | 1 Commentary: Why Hillary will probably win
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During the Republican convention in Cleveland, I found myself talking with a
GOP operative involved with the Trump campaign. Unprompted, he laid out two
scenarios for how this election could work out. In scenario one, Trump gets
a rather surprising, Brexit-esque surge that propels him to victory. In the
second, Trump gets wiped out, winning only the deep-red states.
That less-than-bullish assessment was him trying to spin me, which was
interesting enough. But with both conventions over and the general election
having begun in earnest, it's worth thinking about his second scenario, the
one where Trump loses big.
Trump slams Clinton as general election begins
Play VIDEO
Trump slams Clinton as general election begins
With less than 100 days to go until Election Day, Hillary Clinton should be
considered the heavy favorite to win. Polls will go up in down over the next
few months, and Trump will periodically hold a lead in national polls.
However, when we consider the unforgiving realities of the Electoral College
, we see how hard it will be for Trump to win, and how easy it is to imagine
him getting buried.
The Daily Beast's Mike Tomasky made the case for a Clinton landslide in June
, and while Trump's numbers have improved a bit since then, the math still
decidedly favors a Hillary win. Take the Suffolk University poll that came
out last week that showed Clinton leading by by nine points in Pennsylvania
at a time when Trump should have been enjoying a cushy convention bounce.
And while Pennsylvania is a must-win for Trump, it's not for Clinton. She
can become president without it, and he can't.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania, there's a good chance he'll win Ohio as well,
and maybe even Michigan and Wisconsin. This is the scenario Michael Moore
has been using to scare liberals the past few weeks, and it makes sense in
some ways: if Trump's message is tailored specifically for anyone, it's for
downwardly mobile whites in the Rust Belt. Should he sweep all four of those
states, that will give him 64 Electoral votes, which is exactly the number
President Obama won by last time.
But Clinton is leading in Pennsylvania - a Marist/NBC poll last week found
the same thing that Suffolk did -- and a post convention bounce for her
could take the state out of contention. Wisconsin, for a whole host of
rather esoteric demographic reasons, is not really Trump country, and gave
Ted Cruz his last big win during the primary. They're tied in Michigan and
Ohio (CBS has Clinton with small leads in both) but if those Pennsylvania
numbers correct, it's reasonable to assume that the Rust Belt uprising Trump
needs won't materialize.
Democrats' strategy focusing on Trump as much as Clinton
Play VIDEO
Democrats' strategy focusing on Trump as much as Clinton
Another flaw with the Moore hypothesis is that it assumes Trump will hold on
to everything Romney won. There's not a lot of reason to assume he will,
which is where we start getting into landslide territory.
As Tomasky noted, deep-red Utah keeps flashing blue. The polls there keep
showing a struggling Trump, presumably because of the well-known Mormon
antipathy toward him. Georgia, meanwhile, will have an electorate that's 40
percent non-white this cycle, which is good news for Clinton, and make give
Democrats a chance to break the GOP stranglehold on the South. And a June
Zogby poll in Kansas -- a state that last voted Democratic in 1936 --
indicated even it could be up for grabs.
Are any of those states likely to go blue in November? Well, no - landslides
a la 1984, when Ronald Reagan came within a few thousand votes of winning
all 50 states, probably can't happen in a country this dug-in and polarized,
so it's a safe bet that the reddest corners of the country will stay red.
However, a state like North Carolina, which Romney returned to the
Republican column after Obama snatched a victory there in 2008, could easily
vote for Hillary, particularly now that the Fourth Circuit just struck down
their voter ID law. If it does, Trump could sweep the Rust Belt and still
lose.
Any way you look at it, the only way for Trump to win in November is to pull
off a stunning high wire act. He needs to win states that Republicans haven
't won in decades in addition to swing states and everything Romney won last
time. And he needs to do it all with a turnout operation that will pale in
comparison to the Democrats.
Trump can still win. There's just not much reason right now to expect he
will. |
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