The Patriot Post® · Down to the Wire

For the last couple of weeks, the mainstream media has been trying to tell us that Joe Biden is pulling away from Donald Trump, and they’ve been trumpeting his lead in the polls as proof. But no sensible person believes these polls.

The Biden camp certainly doesn’t believe them. On Saturday, his campaign sent out a three-page memo with a warning to staff and supporters: “The reality is that this race is far closer than some of the punditry we’re seeing on Twitter and on TV would suggest.”

Calling the race “neck and neck” in critical battleground states, the memo continued, “If we learned anything from 2016, it’s that we cannot underestimate Donald Trump or his ability to claw his way back into contention in the final days of a campaign.”

Yesterday, even the Trump-addled scribes at The Washington Post began to reach for the Maalox. “Biden leads Trump. So did Hillary Clinton. For Democrats, it’s a worrisome campaign déjà vu,” went the Post’s headline.

“The polls,” they wrote, “are once again delivering feel-good boosts to Democrats: Joe Biden beats President Trump by 10, 11 or 12 points nationally, depending on the day. His edge in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin averages eight. Propeller-heads promise better than 4 in 5 odds of a new president next year. But then the partisans remember they have been here before, four years ago this week. The conflicting emotions can be overwhelming.”

Those “conflicting emotions” no doubt plague every Biden staffer who happens to get a glimpse of a Trump campaign rally. Yesterday, for example, he drew a huge and enthusiastic crowd in Carson City, Nevada, where he riffed for 90 minutes or so in the late afternoon sun about the booming economy, the “Chinese Plague,” and the “criminal enterprise” otherwise known as the Biden family.

So this was Carson City, but it might just as well have been Sanford, Florida; or Greenville, North Carolina; or Janesville, Wisconsin; or Muskegon, Michigan. Wherever he goes, the people show up en masse. And yet his opponent, Joe Biden, can’t seem to draw flies.

Trump is working to increase his support from suburban women, and there’s little doubt he’ll outperform his 2016 numbers with blacks and Hispanics. And he’ll have one last face-to-face crack at Joe Biden, when they square off in their final debate on Thursday in Nashville. There, it’s our expectation that if deeply compromised debate moderator Kristen Welker doesn’t ask Joe Biden some tough questions about the incriminating evidence found on his son Hunter’s abandoned MacBook laptop, Donald Trump will.

Lastly, we don’t want to give the impression that polling is uniformly unreliable. One pollster, for example, actually got things right in 2016. He had Trump winning both Michigan and Pennsylvania when no one else did, and he actually predicted Trump winning 306 electoral votes (he got 304), when all the big-name polling “experts” had Hillary Clinton winning in a rout. And just who was this prescient pollster? Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar Group.

As National Review’s Rich Lowry notes, “As a general matter, [Cahaly] discounts national polls. First, because the race for the presidency is won state by state, not on the basis of the national vote. Second, because all the methodological difficulties involved in getting a balanced, representative sample in a state poll of 1,000 people are magnified in a national survey. ‘It’s easily skewable at that point,’ he says. ‘You start making assumptions.’”

Thus, between now and Election Day, when you hear the Leftmedia giddily promoting the latest poll showing Biden up by a healthy margin, don’t believe it. The 2020 race, just like the 2016 race, will be won in the battleground states, not in California or New York or Illinois. And in the battleground states, Trump is trending.

“We cannot become complacent because the very searing truth is that Donald Trump can still win this race,” wrote Biden Campaign Manager Jen O'Malley Dillon in the aforementioned memo, “and every indication we have shows that this thing is going to come down to the wire.”

Yes it will, and yes he can.