If the election were held today…
With former president Donald Trump and current president Joe Biden having last week sewn up the number of delegates needed to win the nominations of their respective parties, we are now in week two of what will be the longest general election campaign for president in recent memory.
Harold Wilson, British Prime Minister in the mid 1960s, is credited with saying, “A week is a long time in politics.” If that’s true, we have 33 long weeks until election day. But with that said, get used to hearing the phrase, “If the election were held today…” That phrase is going to be used a lot in the next 230 days.
Such as now.
The Electoral College map above from 270toWin.com reflects the fact that the Real Clear Politics average of polls shows Donald Trump leading President Biden in all of the swing states that gave Biden his margin of victory in 2020.
That’s bad news for Joe Biden.
Giving Trump the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada – states that Biden won in 2020 and where Trump now leads by a margin greater than the margin of error in the polls and greater than Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 – if the election were held today, Trump wins the presidency with 283 Electoral College votes.
Worse for Biden is that since last week, Pennsylvania has moved from leaning Biden to leaning Trump.
This week the Biden campaign seized upon remarks that Trump made at a rally over the weekend and, with the help of the legacy media, has taken a key sound bite from those remarks and turned it into a campaign commercial.
Fox News’s Kevin Corke tells the story:
Kevin Corke: Former President Trump’s remarks about a possible coming bloodbath in the auto industry.
Donald Trump: Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole… That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.
Kevin Corke: But they’re not going to sell those cars. They’re building massive factories. They’re not going to sell those cars. Did you hear him say that? Of course, that quote, a bloodbath, was taken out of context, but they ran with the story anyway, giving the public a false impression, which is precisely what critics say the Biden administration is now doing with its new campaign ad.”
It’s a tough week for Donald Trump. He has until Monday to post a bond of nearly half a billion dollars so that he might appeal a civil judgement handed down against him by a judge in New York City. If he can’t post the bond, New York attorney general Letitia James could start seizing his New York properties.
Trump reacted by saying this:
And this is just a corrupt group of people. It’s election interference, and we’ll see how the courts rule on it.”
