I Don't Know

Normally, I have a good sense of elections. 2016 messed up the sensor, but if I’m honest, a lot of it was emotional — not fathoming people could go for a guy like Trump. Frankly, I think that is why so many Clinton supporters gravitated to the idea that Russia stole the election. They’ve never been able to come to terms with how bad a candidate Hillary Clinton was and how people could choose Trump over Clinton. But, spend enough time with enough Trump voters and you start to understand just how many Americans have felt left behind by Republicans and Democrats. Those people went for Trump.

People keep asking me now what I think and I’ll tell you, but also, I don’t know and want to tell you why.

If the polling is mostly accurate, Joe Biden is going to win and it probably won’t be close. We could have a President Biden by 1:00 am on Wednesday. I tend to think the polling is not so bad and that this is likely.

But there’s something else happening.

I take it as true because people in the Trump campaign say it is true in private conversations, that senior citizens are moving to Biden. That has everything to do with Trump as a person and not the GOP.

I take it as true because people in the Trump and the Biden campaigns say it is true in private conversations, that Hispanic voters and younger black men are going to Trump.

I take it as true because we’ve all seen it that rich, college-educated, white voters are headed to Biden, while blue-collar voters stick with Trump.

This is a realignment of American politics.

Realignments are not things easily seen or understood while they are happening. They need to be examined with some distance between them to get a sense of what is really happening. But just about every hundred years, American political parties undergo some major realignment and I think the reason I’m not sure about Tuesday is that I know the realignment is happening.

I think the realignment is ongoing and won’t be enough for Trump to win. But I think the realignment is happening. I think whichever party wins the White House is going to be thoroughly rocked in two years in the off-year election because of this realignment. Such a realignment will escalate once the election is over and the party in charge of the White House will probably have a serious internal civil war.

Right now, what I know is that the polling shows Biden winning. What the polling also shows is that people think their neighbors are voting for Trump, which suggests the people being surveyed are closet Trump voters. When you take those together, you have a latent bed of support for Donald Trump that is far higher than the polls suggest, even if not enough for victory.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you my final guess on the Electoral College. Right now, I continue to think Biden has an advantage and could win. If I must choose a bad scenario, I’d rather a Democrat White House and Republican Senate than the opposite, but I have no idea really what is going to happen.

What I know for certain is that we have a day to go and things are very fluid as old coalitions fall apart and new ones are slow to assemble. What I know for certain is that any Republican who has any certainty right now is probably not someone to listen to.

The only two things I am certain of is that the country won’t end if Biden wins and God is still in charge, so His will be done.