ROGER STON:Here’s How Trump Could Still Pull Off A Historic Upset On Election Day
(Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
I believe the president is poised to pull yet another upset to stun the elites who so despise him and his pledge to put America first. As we approach Election Day, President Trump has the odds stacked against him, but victory may in fact be at hand.
Unsurprisingly, Trump has lagged behind establishment nominee Joe Biden in the rigged polls throughout the campaign, but a strong performance in the final debate in Nashville gave the president some considerable forward momentum.
The combination of internet censorship, flagrant corporate-owned media bias and evidence of potential voter fraud, however, remain serious obstacles.
Yet I would like to point to several factors that I believe will give the country another shock like the upset victory over Crooked Hillary Clinton in 2016.
If Donald Trump turns out to be the surprise winner once again this year, these will be the reasons why.
Many Trump voters are shy.
One of the most apparent factors influencing politics today is the “social desirability” bias, meaning voters who support Trump feel pressured to hide their views in public polls. With increased violence against and harassment of Trump voters, many Trump voters will simply not tell a pollster over the telephone that they are going to vote for the president.
Trump voters have consistently shown an intense level of support for their candidate. Just as the huge turnout of Trump rallies in 2016 was an anecdotal but important measure of support, and was ignored by the media then, Trump’s crowds are bigger and more boisterous in 2020. Is this hidden vote 3%? Is it 5%? We won’t know until Election Day.
Republicans are winning the voter registration battle.
Voter registration numbers in battleground states are another source of optimism in the Trump camp. “Democrats consistently out-registered Republicans in 2016,” noted a Trump campaign source to the Hill, “but now we are consistently out-registering them.”
Between August and November 2016, Democrats out-registered Republicans in Florida by more than 78,000 voters. However, from August until now, the GOP has a registration lead of approximately 104,000 in the Sunshine State, according to the Hill.
We see the same pattern in Pennsylvania, where a small Democrat advantage during those last four months in 2016 has changed to a Republican gain of nearly 72,000 this year.
Trump’s grass roots campaign has improved.
The Trump team has been counting on traditional door-to-door canvassing to pay off big. Trump has more than 2.5 million volunteers, which is more than the 2.2 million who supported Barack Obama during his historic 2008 run for the White House, the Hill reported.
In one single week of September, the Trump campaign celebrated volunteers knocking on more than 500,000 doors in swing states. “We’re actually running a real campaign,” said Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager.
The Biden people claim that they have also built a robust ground infrastructure. Yet, Biden’s camp has been extremely reluctant to move to door knocking — a hesitation supposedly rooted in concern about the coronavirus. The inability of Biden to draw large crowds to his public events undercuts their claim to have a large and active volunteer field force.
The rise of spontaneous rallies, car caravans and boat parades not organized by the Trump campaign with huge participation are yet another example of the intensity of the president’s support. In almost forty years in American politics and eleven Republican presidential campaigns, I have never seen anything like it.
Black voters are not excited about Joe Biden and for good reason.
A careful comparison of the pre-pandemic polls, when President Trump led Joe Biden, and the post-pandemic polls show that while virtually every other voter group remained static, the president’s promising percentage among both African American and Hispanic voters was virtually cut in half. If President Trump had these votes previously, it can be reasonably assumed that he could win them back.
Trump has focused on black voters more than any GOP presidential candidate ever. His campaign has advertised on urban radio, and the Republican National Convention included several high-profile African American supporters such as NFL star Herschel Walker.
In fact, Joe Biden’s authorship of the 1994 crime bill is directly responsible for the harsh mandatory penalties for first time, non-violent crime of possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use. This law has been an ignominious social, economic and racist failure which has fallen disproportionally on the shoulders of African-Americans and other poor people.
His running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, as both District Attorney in San Francisco and California State Attorney General, enforced this flawed law with zeal.
The president has juxtaposed this with his championship of both the First Step Act and the Second Chance Act; both giving nonviolent convicts in prison for long mandatory sentences a chance at freedom and rehabilitation. The president did a most effective job of raising this issue in the last debate. The release from prison of Alice Johnson and ex-boxer Duke Tanner only serves to underline this contrast with Biden.
FiveThirtyEight recently noted that while older African Americans remain loyal Democratic voters, younger voters are less partisan. Polling from UCLA Nationscape showed support for Donald Trump among Black voters between ages 18-44 rose from 10% in 2016 to 21% this year, according to the Hill. There are early indicators that these younger voters are voting.
Again, as in 2016, a slight but significant increase of support among black voters in just three states will tip this race to the president.
Latinos for Trump are a force to be reckoned with.
While Trump likely will not win the majority of the Latino vote nationwide, his support among many Latinos has endured since 2016. Trump won 28% of the Latino vote in 2016, according to exit polls — better than 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, who essentially sides with Democrats on immigration, the Hill reported.
Examining those Hispanic voters who the president had pre-pandemic and lost post-pandemic reveals that they are more likely to be employed by small businesses, are entrepreneurial, religious and pro-life. Hispanic American employment prior to the pandemic hit record levels because of the President’s program of cutting taxes and regulations.
Trump could contrast Joe Biden’s proposal to raise taxes and regulations on small business, increase federal spending and reinstate the international one-size-fits-all trade agreements with his own record of job creation to shore up his support in this demographic.
Trump continues to poll at consistent levels with Hispanic voters. The situation is especially interesting in Florida, the largest and most crucial battleground state, where two major polls in September showed Trump with a small lead among Florida Latinos, according to the Hill.
Trump must turn out his vote.
The president has correctly objected to hastily constructed schemes for mail-in voting in some states, but his objection has to some extent shaken the confidence of older Republican voters, who have confused mail-in voting with absentee voting. They therefore now fear that if they vote by absentee, their vote will somehow not be counted.
This means the Trump campaign or the RNC must also spend additional resources on turning out votes that previously would have already been tabulated by Election Day. Election Day activities will matter, and this is where the 2.5 million Trump volunteers are a huge asset.
Early voting in Florida reveals an interesting trend. Republicans are out-voting Democrats, with heavily Democrat Miami-Dade County having Republicans running even with Democrats in the early vote turnout. This again reflects the intensity of support for the president.
Ballot security must be a concern.
If my premonition of a razor-thin margin for one candidate or the other is accurate, it is essential that the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee or the “Stop The Steal” organization of Republican lawyers must have voters lined up who have standing to file the appropriate legal motions to challenge questionable results and must be prepared to collect and submit persuasive hard evidence of voter fraud.
If there is, as I suspect, widespread and credible evidence of voter fraud, the president’s lawyers must be prepared to collect the credible evidence and preserve their legal options to challenge the results, even if the fake news media is attempting to stampede the public by rubber-stamping a fraudulent election.
They now twist and distort anything I say publicly, so let me state it clearly: I renounced violence as a solution to any dispute over the outcome of the election just days from now. If there is sufficient credible evidence of voter fraud which would mar the results and if the fake news media and the violent shock-troops of the Democrat Party are attempting to stampede the country into accepting the illegitimate election of Vice President Joe Biden, the dispute must still be settled in the courts rather than the streets.
Don’t underestimate Donald Trump.
Trump is an indefatigable campaigner who actually likes people and draws strength from his massive crowds. Trump on the stump is entertaining, funny, likeable and cutting in his attacks on the Democrats. As in 2016, Donald Trump is the best thing about the Trump campaign, which undeniably misspent its massive financial resources early in the campaign — making them less competitive on paid media in the closing weeks. The president can make up for this gap through the extraordinary free media coverage the president gets on the stump.
The Democrats are handicapped by Joe Biden’s lack of physical and mental stamina and the growing legitimate questions regarding Joe Biden’s role in his son’s business activities — which are now not only documented in a laptop turned over to the FBI, but also by two former business partners of Hunter Biden, Tony Bobulinski and Devan Cooney.
Donald Trump, a happy warrior with an incredible record of success to sell, will prevail in yet another come-from-behind victory simply by outworking, outfoxing and out-campaigning his opponent. You can expect the Democrats and their handmaiden in the fake news media to begin their next bogus impeachment effort the day after the election.
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