Trump and the Polls: It's Not Over until the Fat Lady Sings!

This is an updated version of what I first published on October 17.

(Trump’s chances of winning have improved since then.)

These are tough days and nights for Donald J. Trump. Polls indicate his chances of winning the presidency are fading fast. His only consolation and the only consolation of his fans seems to be “knowledge” that the polls are rigged.

(By contrast: the days since the FBI announced it had more Clinton emails, by way of Anthony Weiner of all people, were days of lost sleep and heavy drinking for those of us who can’t stomach Trump; we are happier this morning, however, now that James Comey has basically said: “Never mind! Nothing new here folks. False alarm.”)

If that isn’t enough, Trump and his fans believe Democrats are going to turn out millions of the deceased to cast ballots from the Great Beyond. The election will apparently resemble a bad version of The Walking Dead.

Trump should be winning, as all his supporters know, because Trump says he should and Trump ran a perfect campaign. His fans know he would get 106% of the popular vote, if the media didn’t hate their man. They know he won all six debates, including one involving Abraham Lincoln. Trump has polls (not rigged!) proving he did. And all Republicans jumping ship or refusing to board from the start are part of a nefarious conspiracy.

(Sarah Palin called them rats!)

Four of the last five men to run for president on the GOP ticket say they don’t support Trump. That includes George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. They are all terrible people.

Paul Ryan is a scumbag too.

Trump would win all fifty-two states if it weren’t for these traitors.

(Meanwhile, the VP candidate on the Libertarian ticket has essentially called on supporters to vote for...Hillary Clinton. Go figure! He says a Trump presidency would introduce a world much like George Orwell feared in 1984.)

Considering all the bitter Trump tears, perhaps we might look at a few miscellaneous facts. The same polls Mr. Trump insists are rigged today once showed, during the GOP primaries, that he was always ahead.

Remember those glory days? Remember how Trump always bragged about his big, giant poll numbers?

When did the fix come in? Consider a few trends that bode well for Hillary Clinton. For some reason, Hispanic voters (not illegal immigrants—but living, breathing citizens who can and will cast ballots) don’t like Mr. Trump. In Arizona, on September 13, these voters favored Clinton by 68% to 18%.

In Florida the numbers were 53-29%.

(A poll four days ago, on November 3, has Clinton now leading with Florida Hispanics by a 60-30% margin.)

Then again, these numbers were reported by an actual newspaper—the Washington Post—part of a conspiracy to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. Hispanic voters really loved Trump—because Trump claimed they did. (Hispanic voters also went for President Obama in 2012 and did so in even greater numbers.)

Then, there’s more rigging—this time by Pew Research—to show that voters with a college degree or higher favor Clinton over Trump by 53-29%. (Obama won the same group, but narrowly, four years ago.)

Let’s look at more rigging! Fox News—Trump’s safe spot when he needs to cry on Sean Hannity’s shoulder—admitted Trump was unpopular with African Americans. In August Clinton had 85% support among this demographic. Gary Johnson polled 7%.

Trump had 1%.

Again, the rigging has been “clear” for years. John Kerry, who lost in 2004, won 88% of the African-American vote. In 2012 President Obama swept Mitt Romney aside with 93% of this vote.

Trump does, however, seem to have the KKK vote locked down.

(Even more locked down than before: now that the official newspaper of the KKK has actually endorsed Donald Trump! I mean: you can’t make this stuff up!)

How about women? John Kerry narrowly won with American women, 51-48% in 2004, but lost by a slightly larger margin among men. Obama won the female demographic 56-44% in 2008 and 53-44% in 2012. (Damn rigged voting numbers!) Maybe the GOP could do better if they started supporting equal pay for women, came up with an actual health care plan to replace Obamacare if they do manage to win, and stopped insisting women who are raped have to carry any pregnancy that results to term. Republicans have been losing with women for years—and the Trump “outreach” plan isn’t helping. 

Bragging about grabbing pussy isn’t exactly a strategy to win.

How rigged are the polls? Apparently, very bigly rigged. Last December 59% of American women had an unfavorable opinion of Trump. By March 2016 that number had ballooned to 73%. You could argue loudly—and Donald Trump does—that all these numbers are rigged; but the same sort of polls consistently report Hillary Clinton’s problems. Clinton is the second most-disliked candidate ever to run for president. Rigged poll after rigged poll has shown her with a negative “favorability” rating. Current results average out to 43% favorable, 52% unfavorable.

You can look it up. 

This proves something—in the confused thinking of Donald Trump and his fans—that he absolutely has to be winning!

Only the same polls show the tangerine-colored bombast to be the most disliked candidate in American history. His negative favorability marks are even worse. Currently, 35% of Americans view him favorably.

His “unfavorable” mark is 61%.

(Today the numbers still favor Secretary Clinton: but not by much. Clinton sits at -14; Trump has a score of -19. So he has come up!)

Consider the sheer stupidity of this Trumpian position. Polling data from Arizona indicates he holds a narrow 1 point lead over Clinton, as of today. Similar polls showed Mitt Romney would win the state easily four years ago—and he did, 54-44%. The polls that show Trump narrowly leading today show John McCain (not a hero!!!!) up 16 points on his Democratic challenger. The numbers in Ohio are similar, indicating how poorly the polls are rigged by Democrats and the media and left-wing body snatchers.

The most recent poll of Ohioans shows Trump up 1 point, 42-41%. But the trend of the five most recent polls shows Clinton up 1.6.

Senator Rob Portman, a Republican running in the same battleground, is winning with ease. If the election were today, Portman would clobber his opponent, Ted Strickland, by 16 actual mathematical points.

(Today, Trump leads in Ohio by 3.5 points; Portman now leads by 18. In other words, you have the same basic result. And, as a Democrat, let me say to the GOP, “Thanks for not running Governor John Kasich this year.”)

In Florida, “Little Marco” is polling ahead of his opponent. Rubio is up 5. Where Trump is involved, polls go back to being rigged, and he’s down 4.

(Now: Rubio up 3.7; Trump down 0.8.)

The “rigging” is even worse if we turn to FiveThirtyEight, the most highly respected polling website. Here Nate Silver has Trump trailing nationally by 6.8 points. Silver called all fifty states correctly in 2012, whereas the talking heads at Fox News got the election all wrong.

Even more ominously,  for Trump fans—who apparently hate percentages as much as they hate taxes (not that Trump pays), Kenyan Obama and Crooked Hillary—Silver believes polls show Clinton ahead in every one of ten main battleground states.

Rigged polls?

As recently as July 30, Silver had Trump slightly ahead (briefly) and hanging close as late as September 26, the day of the first presidential debate, the day Trump turned in his “winning” performance. (This was followed up by Trump spending a week focusing on how fat a former Miss America was.) Trump never admitted he lost the first debate or lost the second. And if he said in this third debate on Wednesday that he planned to torture critics if elected, send political opponents to military trials in Guantanamo, have patriotic supporters beat up any protesters and bragged that he could get away with grabbing Rudy Giuliani’s wife’s crotch…well…loyal fans would still love him.

The problem, however, for Trump fans is that there aren’t enough of them to form a majority in three weeks.

It’s not impossible that Trump can win—because math is math—and it’s never over until the fat lady sings (probably an unfortunate analogy, considering Mr. Trump’s penchant for insulting American women). That doesn’t mean it isn’t highly unlikely. 

If you don’t believe me, check the betting line in Las Vegas today. Odds makers say, 6-1, Hillary comes out ahead.

(Today, Silver gives Trump a much better chance to win; and if you like Trump, I fear you may have real reason to hope. I mean you have reason to hope. I fear he might win. Anyway, as of right now, 10:45 a.m., the day before the election, Silver gives your side a 33.9% chance to win, almost triple what he had three weeks ago. In fact, he believes, when he looks at the polls, that Trump will win both North Carolina and Florida.

And again: Silver called every state in 2012 right.)

We will find out tomorrow if the pollsters are right.

***

P. S. Elections are controlled almost entirely at the state level. Polling places, early voting times and dates, absentee ballot notifications, even whether or not felons can vote (in Ohio they can) are set by the states. In the following battleground states, Republicans would have to do the rigging since they control the government: Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin.

And did anyone notice that when Democrats were “stealing” the last two presidential elections, and now plan to steal a third, they proved unable to steal off-year elections in 2010 and 2014 when the GOP took control of both houses of Congress?

If Donald Trump loses this election—and, like Las Vegas bookies, I’m betting he will—he’s going to have no one to blame but himself.

(The betting line today is still 4-1 for Hillary Clinton.)

The Democrats ran a flawed candidate and the Republicans had an excellent shot all along to win. Then Trump started shooting himself in the foot—and the ass—and last and certainly not least, right in the nuts.