Trump’s time is nearly up says US politics commentator Adam Aiken

Democrats are getting nervous. They are still haunted by 2016, when they though Hillary Clinton had the presidency in the bag, only for Donald Trump to snatch it at the last moment.

Whether it’s genuine fear among the Democratic faithful or just spin from Joe Biden’s campaign to keep his supporters on their toes, it’s way off the mark. Trump is not going to win next month.

But didn’t most people say the same thing four years ago? The polls were wrong then, and they could be wrong again this year.

There’s one problem with that argument: the polls in 2016 weren’t wrong.

For starters, polls aren’t predictions of what will happen, so they can’t be right or wrong. They are snapshots of what people say they will do. If those people change their minds or lie when they give their answers, the polls might look very different from the eventual results. But that doesn’t mean the polls were wrong – what was wrong was how the pundits interpreted them.

Put that technical point aside, though. Even if you do consider polls to be actual predictions, the 2016 polls still weren’t that far out. They showed Clinton winning the popular vote by a few percentage points. She eventually won it by just over two percentage points, or nearly three million votes.

The reason Clinton lost was down to geography. Clinton thought she would win Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes out of the 6.1 million cast in that state. In Wisconsin he had a majority of 22,000, with nearly three million votes cast. And he scraped home by 10,000 votes in Michigan, where 4.8 million votes were cast.

So why will the outcome be any different in 2020?

First, the Democrats were massively complacent in 2016, and they failed to acknowledge that states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were even in play, let alone that they would be lost. In the final weeks of the election, Clinton headed to Republican-leaning states such as Arizona as she attempted to make what she thought would be a secure majority even more comfortable. She didn’t campaign at all in Wisconsin.

Biden has learnt that lesson and those toss-up states have not been forgotten this time.

Then there are the pollsters. The media are looking at things in a more nuanced way. Sure, the national polls are good overall barometers of sentiment across the country, with the most recent ones show Biden leading Trump by an average of nearly 8pc.

But this time the pundits are paying closer attention to what is happening in the “swing states” – those states that will decide the ultimate winner. And the news is good for Biden there, too. The latest polls see him ahead in Florida and North Carolina, as well as in that trio of states that Trump narrowly won in 2016. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll put him up 8pc in Wisconsin and a MIRS/Mitchell poll in Michigan put him up 10pc there.

Next, there are the news cycles. US elections often have “October surprises” – late-breaking developments that threaten to throw a spanner in the works. In 2016, Trump managed to bluster his way through the Access Hollywood scandal in which he was caught on tape bragging about how he liked to assault women.

Clinton, on the other hand, saw her campaign thrown off course when the FBI announced it was looking into allegations that classified emails had been sent from, and stored on, private servers. The FBI closed its investigation a few days later but Clinton never quite got her momentum back.

That’s very different this year, though. This week we have seen an “October surprise” with the release of leaked emails that purport to show corruption by Hunter Biden – Joe’s son – while he was working for a Ukrainian gas company and his father was vice-president.

In any other year, this might move the needle and make people think twice about voting for Biden. But after the maelstrom of chaos and scandal that the past four years have given us, many people have lost the capacity to be shocked.

More than half a dozen of Trump’s closest allies and aides have been charged or jailed since 2016, the president himself has been impeached over allegations of soliciting foreign interference in US elections, and he has been accused of paying hush money to a porn star. So the idea that voters concerned about allegations of corruption might lean towards Trump seems a tad far-fetched.

All in all, then, the odds are massively against Trump repeating his surprising and impressive victory of four years ago. It’s almost impossible to see how he can win this time, despite the Democrats’ apparent jitters.

Trump will probably fight the result and attempt to delegitimise his loss, but it will be tilting at windmills. His time is nearly up and it’s hard to see any way back for him from here.

Adam Aiken is a freelance journalist who writes about US politics.