Publicly Democrats are confident that their crooked queen can defeat Donald Trump because, well, he’s Donald Trump.
Privately they’re terrified:
Every assertion about Trump during the primary battle proved wrong: he’ll never run; he won’t file financial disclosures; he’ll be forced out by his own words; all those people at this rallies won’t actually turn out to vote; he has a ceiling; the party will coalesce around an alternative; the institutional wing of the party will never accede to his nomination. Perhaps most importantly, it was hard for many insiders to imagine that when voters were truly asked to fill in the bubble beside the name “Donald Trump” on a presidential ballot, they wouldn’t be jolted back to reality and vote for a real candidate.
None of those things happened. The establishment folded; Trump’ ceiling just got higher, and he ended up collecting more primary votes than any Republican candidate in history, wiping out a generation of ambitious, aspiring GOP leaders with serious track records. To say the least, this record does not inspire confidence that the normal patterns will hold in a general election.
Indeed, at a panel of Democratic pollsters last week, Hart Research president Geoff Garin warned that 2016 would be “a close competitive election. The country,” he added, “is largely frustrated with the status quo, and, as one NBC poll found, huge majorities wanted change even if they don’t know what that change is.”
Moreover, as they say in ads for investment banks, past results are no guarantee of future performance. For instance, the prognosticators say that for Trump to win with the expected electorate, he’d need almost two-thirds of the white vote, and that target is all but out of reach. But why? All through the primaries, Ted Cruz’s campaign was arguing that their data-analytics tool would be able to finally find the “missing millions” that conservatives have always dreamt of and get them out in places like central Pennsylvania in November. What if Trump can draw them out with his blisteringly effective strategy of tweets, rallies and free TV?
This does not require a revolution. What it requires is enough white voters to get excited in the right states. Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, framed the election outlook for Clinton in blunt terms: “If turnout is 70 percent white, I like her chances,” he said. “If it’s 74 percent … I’m very worried.”
2016 is not a good year to have to rely on common wisdom…
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Tags: 2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, Democrats, Donald Trump, Elections, Hillary Clinton