Over at Ricochet, Heather Higgins, the president and CEO of Independent Women’s Voice, says that her money is on a Donald Trump victory. Here are a few reasons she’s probably going to lose some cash.
Establishment
Higgins says that Trump is “disliked by the establishment,” just as Reagan in 1980, Gingrich in 1994 and Brexit in 2016. But being anti-establishment isn’t enough to win an election. It wasn’t enough for Bernie Sanders, who seemed to have much of the “popular momentum” among Democratic primary voters that she seems to think Trump has with the general electorate now.
There seemed to be a lot of anti-establishment momentum against Mitt Romney in 2012, yet he prevailed in that Republican primary. Barry Goldwater, in 1964, fit a lot of the anti-establishment mold that Trump seems to fit but lost the general election in the biggest popular vote landslide in American history.
It’s possible to be anti-establishment and win, and it’s possible to be establishment and lose. But being disliked by the establishment alone isn’t enough to explain why Trump will win.
Polls vs. Friends
The speed at which Trump supporters have gone from bragging about polls to disavowing them altogether is enough to make your head spin.
Higgins writes: “Who are you going to believe, polls or your lying eyes? I started asking people in the spring for whom they were voting. A surprisingly large percentage of not-supposed-to-be-a-Trump-supporter types turned out to be exactly that.”
It’s a comment reminiscent of Pauline Kael’s famous line from 1972, “I only know one person who voted for Nixon.” (Often misquoted as “Everyone I know voted for McGovern.”) Most Americans, especially political activists, live in an ideological bubble. Most of the people they speak to agree with them. No matter how many people you talk to, you aren’t going to get any more of an accurate picture of what the public is thinking than a poll that consciously tries to find a large representative sample of voters.
You’re much better off believing the polls. They burst through bubbles and get a random sampling of likely voters. When it comes to presidential elections, especially in the modern era, they do a pretty decent job of getting things right.
In 2012 the polls were supposedly skewed against Mitt Romney. In the end, the polls were actually too optimistic on Romney’s chances.
Stages of Grief
One point Higgins makes that I do agree with is that more anti-Trump conservatives will come around to Trump. She describes these voters as going through the stages of grief. Eventually, before Election Day, they’ll come around to acceptance and vote for Trump. But this same dynamic is playing out on the left with millions of Sanders voters. Take this op-ed in The Hill, from a Sanders voter making the case for Hillary Clinton, for example.
The closer Election Day gets, the more people will think of the race in simple Clinton vs. Trump terms. Many of the disaffected voters who supported someone else in the primary will say “I don’t like my party’s candidate, but I hate the other party’s candidate.” The Democrats who come back to Clinton will offset, in part or in whole, the Republicans who come back to support Trump.
Bettors
I don’t know if Higgins is literally putting her money on a Trump victory, but few people are. Bettors are giving Clinton a three-in-four chance of winning. They’re predicting Clinton will win the Electoral College with 347 votes to Trump’s 191. That would make Trump a bigger loser than Romney was against President Obama, but better off than John McCain in 2008.
So far, bettors are doing a pretty good job this election. Since mid-February, they predicted Trump would be the most-likely GOP nominee and they turned out to be right. They never wavered from their prediction that Clinton would be the Democratic nominee, even when Sanders drew big rallies and performed better than expected.
Now, they seem quite certain Clinton will win. As Higgins says, “Nothing is ever certain.” But if you’re going to bet on the election, putting your money on Trump is probably a bad idea.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
