A Blue Tsunami

We are on the cusp of a blue tsunami. It is starting to be beyond obvious. I expect a historic voter turnout. Perhaps the largest in the modern era. Americans are about to reject Trumpism all over the nation, perhaps not in a few red states where libertarian thought dominates, even in a pandemic. I am also willing to predict that Trumpism will do better still in rural areas, where the population is older and far more conservative. But even there, because of the trade war with China, it will not be as strong as it was in 2016.

I am willing to predict a few things eight days before November third. Democrats will sweep both Houses of Congress and the White House. It will be historic, and we may even see some Senators lose their seats that think they are still fine. This is one reason that Mitch McConnell is so keen to confirm Amy Coney Barret as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. He knows after the election it would be more difficult to pull off politically. Let's be clear here, if the blue tsunami crests high enough, he may lose not just his majority, but his seat.

This is not about polling and what it tells us. In this sense President Donald Trump is correct, the polls are wrong. However, he misses the reason why. Polls are not capturing the universe of first-time voters. We know we have a lot of these, ranging from people who have not voted in many elections to young voters who are showing up. We are already at turnout numbers approaching the 2016 election, in the midst of a pandemic. We have days to go. The polls capture likely voters. This means those people who have voted regularly in at least two elections. So yes, the president is right, but for the wrong reasons. The polls are missing a lot of voters, and likely not friendly to him.

Something similar happened in 2016. We had two things that happened, The first is that Donald Trump activated a new group of voters. These were the white supremacists, and nationalists that saw him as a way out of where we are heading as a nation. Yes, some of his voters were drawn to him by their economic issues, but a significant group was drawn to him by his nativist views. For multiple reasons reliable Democratic voters also stayed home, in effect giving Trump a victory through the electoral college after the blue wall crumbled. However, the people who are voting this time around, who are getting…