This was at the end of the last of five massive rallies yesterday in five states. Trump is keeping a schedule that would kill two men half his age. Thirty thousand people at the rally in Miami. At midnight.
The electoral map at the beginning of the post, and below, is that of Robert Barnes, an attorney and election gambler whose insights I have found so useful this election cycle. As in years past, TAC will be running a live blog of the election results and I will be using Barnes and pollster Richard Baris as my two main sources for election news and assessments as to what is going on.
Update: Barnes posted his election picks:
Picks for 2020:
Trump to win
Trump map: same as 2016 + MN, NH & maybe NV
Senate: +0 change
House +10 seats for GOP
Senate GOP: GOP holds all but CO, and as likely to pick up MI or MN as lose AZ
Trump margins: OH > than 4; IO > than 6; NC > than 4; FL > than 2; GA > than 4; TX > than 4; PA > than 1.
Err, Robert Barnes Electoral Map???? Invisible.
Thanks for posting this, Donald. I also closely follow Barnes (in addition to Baris), and I pretty much agree with his prognosis. But that prognosis depends on very narrow margins for Trump in the 4 rust belt states, and those narrow margins could easily turn out upside down.
Of the tough call battlegrounds (I’m not counting FL since I think Trump will take it), we might know the outcome NH first, where a Trump win (he narrowly lost in 16) would suggest that Barnes’ optimism is well-grounded. We will likely know WI and MN next, so it will be important and interesting to watch them. While it is unlikely that Trump will need more than one or two of those rust belt states to prevail, a sweep would certainly accelerate concession and inhibit (somewhat) claims of illegitimacy.
I hope I am wrong Mike, but I suspect the Biden campaign will be very reluctant to concede tomorrow night no matter what. Of course in 2016 Clinton did not concede until the next morning. She has told the Biden campaign not to concede under any circumstances which is probably a projection of her wish that she had not conceded. I fear that the ending of this year of punishment could be the rockiest the nation has experienced since 1865.
I hope you are wrong too, Don, but I very much hope we will find out.
There are enough battleground states with likely very close results such that either candidate will almost certainly still have one or more paths to victory available as of the end of tomorrow night, even if they are unlikely or long shots, I would not blame either for not conceding under those circumstances.
While I think we will have some important indicators revealed tomorrow night, and perhaps even reason for confidence (or disappointment), I’d be very surprised if we know enough for certainty. And candidates should be expected to wait until certainty.
This is my map, except I think that PA might not be declared until the last possible minute meaning that the count will be effectively 300 to 218. But that would mean that the President wins regardless.
Rudolph —
Yes, it will almost certainly be days before we know the result in PA. But that will also likely be true for MI, NC, NV and AZ, and possibly OH, which is why following WI and MN will be where the drama is Tuesday evening.
Guys,
Not to throw water on anyone’s fiery enthusiasm, but there are a lot of people from my old submarine and 50% of my co-workers at Neutrons ‘R Us who will vote for Biden. I never thought I would see the day when so many former navy people and nuke co-workers would be so willingly deceived by the Democrats. The family took a day trip to Wilmington, NC the weekend before last to visit the battleship USS North Carolina, and many houses had either Joe Biden placards or the usual LGBTQ leftist “I hate Trump because he’s a hater” placards. Here just across the border in South Carolina I took a walk around the neighborhood the day before yesterday and saw many Trump – Pence flags, but there were a few leftist “luv – luv – luv” placards. The neighbor across the street, the black lady just to one side of my house, and another lady (a banker) to the other side are Democrats. And this mail-in voting thing is attractive to the youngsters too lazy to get out of Moma’s basement and vote in person, and they are all liberals. My own biological daughter, now of voting age, will vote for Biden – Harris (maybe she already has). So yes, Trump supporters have a heck of a lot more enthusiasm than Biden ones. But be prepared if your optimism isn’t realized on Tuesday. There has been 4 more years on top of 2016 when Trump won, and during that time Academia has been continuing to instill godless leftist attitudes in new 18 year old voters. The only way this is going to be fixed is to eradicate leftism from news media and Academia and public schools, and that isn’t going to happen any time soon. And even if Trump wins, he is only a temporary reprieve. The culture of gimme, gimme, gimme has to change, and that requires a change of heart.
While I think we will have some important indicators revealed tomorrow night, and perhaps even reason for confidence (or disappointment), I’d be very surprised if we know enough for certainty. And candidates should be expected to wait until certainty.
My prediction is Biden won’t wait. I think he’s going to unilaterally declare himself the winner based on nothing more than his say so. His campaign will then be positioned to claim the moral high ground in any recount fight, where they’ll accuse Trump of trying to steal the election.
My sons are telling me “young men” of all flavors are voting for Trump and/or against Biden.
Mainly due to the economy, tiredness of lockdowns and hatred of censorship.
This I think is real change from 2016, and one I think will propel Trump to a substantial victory.
Let’s pray he gets just that.
And also,, do you know of a young man that took the time to speak with a pollster ? Non existent. 🙂
David WS
Baris’ polling certainly confirms that Trump is doing much better with men in most states than women, but the most interesting piece of that is his increase in support from young Black and Latino males.
Yes, some of my sons friends are black, and Latino.
My prediction is Biden won’t wait. I think he’s going to unilaterally declare himself the winner based on nothing more than his say so. His campaign will then be positioned to claim the moral high ground in any recount fight, where they’ll accuse Trump of trying to steal the election
If it comes to a fight my money is on Trump.
My money is on Trump too. It’s just more damage to our political institutions in the name of expedient partisan advantage.
Well, I hope this chap has the right model. Polling has turned into a species of alchemy.
I wouldn’t be looking forward to tomorrow even if I didn’t think there wouldn’t be massive fraud. I’d have told you a generation ago that I was skeptical that our institutions could handle the demands of their history. Since then, generic private enterprise in this country has proven to be quite innovative while the government, the media, and higher education have seemed to be grosser and less capable every year (the shining light of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era in New York City excepted). This is sustained by the public. AFAICT, the reaction of most of the young and most of the professional-managerial bourgeoisie has been driven by fashion and emotion and the appalling conduct of the Democratic Party and its favored clients just doesn’t register with them. Even a presidential candidate we have every reason to believe is being protected by a palace guard lest the public get a look at his sundowning does not register with them. That his son was in the business of influence peddling and laundering the bribes does not register with them (or their fuzzy brains classify it as ‘Russian disinformation’). That ballot security is in the toilet doesn’t register with them. That tech companies are trying to obstruct public communications in ways that likely never occurred to the Bell System or the Post Office doesn’t register with them. The promoters of dubious social causes are insisting they spread like gangrene to every possible venue doesn’t register with them. That Democratic governors are insisting on scattershot public health measures that do not address the problems we have but do damage everyone’s economic well being doesn’t register with them.
If Biden wins PA we all know why…CHEATING! So many elections now where the total ballots exceeded the registered voters in Philadelphia. Also Mitt Romney didn’t get a single vote in that city! Watch PA carefully they will cheat since ballots can be accepted and counted after Election Day with no matching signature and postmark date
You can thank George Bush appointee Roberts for that one
. The culture of gimme, gimme, gimme has to change, and that requires a change of heart.
Not familiar with that culture. What I see among the young of my acquaintance (and that includes those in early middle age) is an intense and comprehensive deficit of seriousness of mind. I see that among my own contemporaries as well. I’m not talking about viewpoints advanced on normative questions or on esoteric or ambiguous factual matters on which you’re never going to find much common ground. I’m talking about people with graduate degrees saying blatantly stupid and ugly things and doing so with great vehemence. It’s spread to those of my own contemporaries who are influenced by the young. Its almost seemed to me that in the last dozen years we’ve seen the political culture grow so juvenile that Idiocracy is now. Have a gander at the Democratic Party in 2008. Given an excellent opportunity to take back the White House, the only experienced executive who runs is the sketchy Governor of New Mexico; the nomination is won by Barack Obama, an absurd figure if you think about it. Four years in office and the one thing he demonstrates is that he cannot negotiate his way out of a paper bag; he’s returned to office anyway. Of all the people who might succeed him, only five in the Democratic Party run, and given three better candidates, nearly all the votes go to an old Trotskyist and to a horridly corrupt shrike that everyone knows is s terror to work for. Now, this year, given a raft of capable businessmen, experienced state governors, and people who’ve been executives in the public and private sector, the people they favor are a walking resume bereft of actual accomplishment in office (marketing himself as some TV sitcom poof), a rank-and-file member of Congress also remarkable for being a terror to work for, a lapsed law professor (again w/ no time as an executive) who seems like a Saturday Night Live parody of a candidate, the old red grown even older and nastier, and the candidate they nominated, a man who is a stew of pathology. To add to that, we have all of these witless and vicious ‘protests’ over nothing real. SMDH
Trump is nothing to f not tireless.
Idiocracy is now
Nah. I am constantly reminded that the best and the brightest of the top men from the Premier League of the top tier institutions are in charge of everything. And anybody who disagrees is a bitter clinging deplorable who rejects science. And also a loser who had to settle for his safety school. But mostly just a loser.
(Pretty sure I just demonstrated what Art is talking about –at least in part).
Darn. I left out masters of the universe in my tirade of thought cliches.
I’m not talking about viewpoints advanced on normative questions or on esoteric or ambiguous factual matters on which you’re never going to find much common ground. I’m talking about people with graduate degrees saying blatantly stupid and ugly things and doing so with great vehemence.
Actually, this here is a much better example/a< of what Art is talking about.
Art said, “I’m talking about people with graduate degrees saying blatantly stupid and ugly things and doing so with great vehemence.”
That’s 50% of the people with whom I work at Neutrons ‘R Us – brilliant physicists, electronics engineers, civil / structural, mechanical and electrical engineers, etc. They are demonstrably incapable of applying a nuclear-trained mentality to dispassionately examining facts not a part of the work environment.
Thomas Sowell made something of a career writing about how expertise in a specific, specialized field of knowledge do not translate into expertise in general knowledge.
Although some like to pretend it does. (e.g., Jimmy Carter, the nuclear engineer from Annapolis, versus Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor from Eureka college).
Some some cheery news
Biden is collapsing in the polls! The race is trending towards Trump! Dogs and Cats living together!
Actually, this here is a much better example of what Art is talking about.
The mental health trade is a collecting pool of asinine and ill-motivated people. What’s interesting about Lee is that she lives and works at the apex and center of it. The characters who made Raymond Buckey’s life a living hell were sketchy social worker types (its a measure of how little accountability there is in that world that the outfit they worked for still exists). The characters who made Gary Ramona’s life a living hell were a counselor and a psychiatrist at a small community hospital in Anaheim, Calif. This woman was a resident at Mass General and is a peripheral faculty member at Yale Medical School.
Biden is collapsing in the polls! The race is trending towards Trump! Dogs and Cats living together!
Dogs and cats live together amicably when you introduce them properly. We had a dog who got terribly depressed when we lost our cat in 1973. We got a new cat. Our dog was overjoyed. Our new cat took to imitating him, running to the door with him and making a little bark noise. She never quite recovered from losing him.
And it’s quite normal for there to be some terminal shifts toward the Republican candidate late in the race. Not sure why that is.
No clue what’s up. I feel I’ve outlived myself, and don’t understand much of what’s going on anymore.
Waal, FWIW, some social survey research on the opinions of working engineers:
https://www.machinedesign.com/news/article/21819513/the-politics-of-engineers
Although some like to pretend it does. (e.g., Jimmy Carter, the nuclear engineer from Annapolis, versus Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor from Eureka college).
Not sure who pretended that. His time in the Navy (and in engineering therein) and his time in agribusiness were part of his campaign biography, but they weren’t major selling points. Carter had a number of problems Reagan did not. (1) indifferent people skills; (2) underdeveloped negotiating skills; (3) and inability to set priorities with a tendency to get bogged down in minutiae. There was story (retailed by the political scientist Militon Cummings, IIRC) of a senior military officer interviewed off the record who said James Schlesinger was a ‘forest man’, Harold Brown was a ‘tree man’ and Jimmy Carter was a ‘leaf man’.
One thing a serious biographer of Reagan will have to tease out is how he was such a natural talent as an administrator. Comparing Reagan to Richard Nixon in this realm is comparing Dave Brubeck to Andy Kaufman’s parody of a lounge singer (“Tony Clifton”).
They are demonstrably incapable of applying a nuclear-trained mentality to dispassionately examining facts not a part of the work environment.
One of our shirt-tails is a high school English teacher given to saying things like “Trump has killed 200,000 people” I’ll leave to the lawyers to parse how many layers of inanity are in that remark. His wife, who works in the home birthing business, took Christine Blasey Fraud seriously. Our English teacher has been antic about having to return to work, the fact that the ratio of COVID deaths to non-COVID deaths in his age group is 0.062 and he’s never been one to pay much attention to canons of prudent living.
notwithstanding.
Not sure who pretended that.
Was taught as an obvious assumption in my high school, and quite literally this morning was “treated” to a meme about how we could be living like the Jetsons, but the US had chosen Reagan.
Idea being that if we’d just hired the smart guy, we’d all be in space and smart and stuff.
Ernst said: “Jimmy Carter, the nuclear engineer from Annapolis.”
Please: don’t use the name Jimmy Carter and title Nuclear Engineer in the same breath. Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’s biggest single failure, God rest his soul in peace. Never went out to sea as a nuke engineer on a sub. Spent time at Canada’s December 1952 Chalk River fiasco. His only experience was an accident. He quit the Navy in 53 to go back peanut farming. Yeah, yeah, his father died. I know the whole story. He never was pro-nuke. Because of him we don’t reprocess used nuclear fuel. Instead, we let it sit for a Yucca Mtn repository that will never be. He was all worried about proliferation of Pu-239 for weapons use. Dumb idiot. Too much Pu-240 and other actinides mixed in. Useless for a bomb as the North Koreans found out when their dud fizzled. Great for a fast neutron reactor however.
The engineers I know, myself and others, are generally: cautious, conservative, details orientated and independent.
– in engineering and politics.
(This predilection will however vary by discipline and certainly on whether they work for the government or not, and sales or not.)
LQC, I do share your pain.. As I do know of one brilliant engineer who’s voting for Biden. How could he be that smart and be that incredibly dumb!?
I chalk that up to this particular eng being an atheist.
Idea being that if we’d just hired the smart guy, we’d all be in space and smart and stuff.
If only Adlai Stevenson had beat Eisenhower!
As William F. Buckley observed about Stevenson, he was always threatening to read a book.
There wasn’t much wrong with Stevenson. However, he was running against the man with extraordinary experience in organization, in executive functions, and in dealing with foreign officials. There was no comparison between the two. Stevenson had considerable intellect, but it wasn’t that which differentiated him from others who might have run. He was ironic, witty, irreligious (nominally Unitarian), divorced (known to the public), given to keeping mistresses (not known), and tended to be a critic of American culture rather than a celebrant. IOW, the chatterati looked at him and saw themselves. He had more integrity than Kennedy and Johnson, had more experience in supervising public agencies, and would have been less effective than LBJ in persuading Congress to do ill-considered things.
As long as we’re playing the ‘what if’ game, what about the smartest guy of all, Richard Nixon? The vice presidency prior to 1960 wasn’t a stepping stone to the presidency unless the President died; none of those who succeeded to the presidency prior to 1890 were subsequently candidates for the office in a general election. Over the years, quondam VPs had been candidates for the Presidency – one headlining a small 3d party, one a faction of the Democratic Party, and just one the Democratic Party in sum; only the last won the office. Yet, here we have Richard Nixon handed the nomination twice: once without significant opposition and once with weak opposition. He had little executive experience to speak of, his pre-political career had been rather truncated compared to Barry Goldwater, Thos, Dewey, Wendell Willkie, Alfred Landon, or Herbert Hoover (much less Eisenhower). In re issues, he was always a lawyer arguing one side or the other for professional reasons. To the extent that he actually had a conception of the right and the good, he tended to side with the Rockefeller wing of the party. The best you could say on that front was that like Spiro Agnew and Gerald Ford he thought the bourgeois suburban life was satisfactory, that it merited no systematic critique, and that the people living it had earned what they had with the usual areas of ambiguity around the edges. Still, why Nixon? Why not Rockefeller or Goodwin Knight or Goldwater or Henry Cabot Lodge or James Rhodes or Wm. Scranton or Harold Stassen or Christian Herter?
Nixon was pure ambition. From a professional politician stand point, his best race was in 1960 which he almost won with the odds against him. In 1968 he almost lost an election where the Democrats were fractured. In 1972 the Democrats obligingly committed political suicide. An introvert, I think Nixon was a divided man who was in a profession he actively disliked for the sake of the power he loved. Nixon also had a huge inferiority complex courtesy of his humble origins and never came to terms with the personal demons that helped to destroy him The contrast with Reagan, a good natured man completely at ease with himself, who never let his origins as the son of the town drunk prey for an instant on his mind, is instructive.
Nixon also had a huge inferiority complex courtesy of his humble origins and never came to terms with the personal demons that helped to destroy him The contrast with Reagan, a good natured man completely at ease with himself, who never let his origins as the son of the town drunk prey for an instant on his mind, is instructive.
Nixon, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan, Walter Mondale, Robert Dole, and Edmund Muskie were all withing one notch of each other among the social strata of the day, albeit occupying various places within the income band applicable to the strata in question. AFAIK, Nixon was the only one among them who suffered notable social anxieties. (I suppose it’s possible that Muskie’s bad temper might be derived in part from that, though).
Nixon’s few good friends are of interest. Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp were both self-made men whose families hadn’t been in the country long. Walter Annenberg had rebuilt his family’s fortunes after they were disgraced.
Dear American cousins,
I’m hoping and praying for a Trump win.
– your Canadian friend.