President Trump in Tough Race Despite Strong Support from His Base

 

With two weeks to go, the presidential election for the soul of America is on its final leg.   The incumbent, President Donald Trump, has 4 years to prove that he can lead this nation in time of peace and crisis.

Mimicking the old playing book of former President Ronald Reagan " Let's Make America Great Again",  Trump lost the general election by almost 2% (about 3 million) in 2016 but won key states that were traditionally Democrat.  He dealt Hillary Clinton a crushing blow with a landslide in electoral votes, 232 to 306.  

He won Wisconsin by 0.7%, Michigan by 0.3% (11,000 votes out of 5.1 million ballots cast) and Pennsylvania by 0.7%.   If he had lost these three states, Clinton would have won, 278 to 260.  The black turnout in Michigan and Pennsylvania felled more than 7%.  In her new documentary, "To Become",  Michelle Obama lamented: "...So the day I left the White House and wrote about how painful it was to sit on it [inauguration] step. Many of our people did not vote. It was almost like a slap in the face. "   

So after 4 years of constant hard ball politics from the Oval Office and the privilege of a presiding president with a hard core and enthusiastic base of voters,  the reality is settling in.  LSI is seeing the following trends:

Barring anything extraordinary and Biden coming down with viral infection and cannot campaign accordingly,  President Trump is in for a tough race.  All national polling shows he is about 8% behind.  But what about the key states that will ultimately determine the necessary electoral votes needed to win.  Trump is trailing in Wisconsin  by 11% , Michigan by 7% and Pennsylvania by 6%.  These three states alone if Biden wins will give him 278 votes.  This is with the assumption the blue states in 2016 will hold for Biden.  The candidate only needs 270 votes to win.

What makes it more challenging is AZ is leaning for Biden and Florida is a dead heat.  North Carolina, a bastion of Republican strong hold, is also up for grab.  

The groups that Trump has relied on, white seniors and household women are not convinced he can provide the stability that the country needs.  The Vietnamese American voters are the only Asian-American group that has shown strong support for him.  But most are living in California and Trump is 31% behind in the state. 

 Trump's command of shrewd political tactics and his pop cultural understanding of the white's sentiments have propelled him into a historical president and presidency.

Whether the voters will allow him to continue, it will be decided on November 3rd and Las Vegas odds are against him for now.  But for a man who filed bankruptcy 6 times in his career to wipe of his debts, he still has many tricks up his sleeve to file bankruptcy another time to run the table on Biden and wins his second term.