Calling it for Trump

In our coverage of Decision 2024 we have from time to time given you the countdown in the number of days until election day. Indeed at KTBB.com slash Decision you will find an actual countdown clock.

Well, forget counting in days. We can now count in hours. As of this minute we have 126 hours and 53 minutes until the polls open in most of Texas. Many of us have already taken advantage of early voting.

So, where does the race stand? It depends on who you ask. If you're asking me, I believe that Trump is going to win the election. Perhaps decisively.

Here's why I believe that.

The former president has the best polling numbers of his career. According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, he is leading in six of the seven battleground states. At this point in the race in 2016 and 2020, he was behind in the swing states by anywhere from four to 10 points.

Nationally, Trump is up by four tenths of a point in the Real Clear Politics average. On this day in 2016, Hillary Clinton was up by just over four points nationally.

The Trump campaign is taking comfort in the fact that the polls in the past two cycles consistently underestimated his actual vote totals – often by very significant margins.

The Harris campaign is countering that argument by saying that the pollsters have adjusted their models and are, if anything, now overestimating Trump's support.

But for the sake of this discussion, let's take the polls at face value. Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona look solid for Trump. That puts him at 262 Electoral College votes, just eight shy of the magic number of 270 needed to win.

Kamala Harris currently enjoys a half a point lead in Michigan, so let's give that state to her, which puts her at 241 Electoral College votes.

That leaves Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. If our assumptions about Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona are correct, Nevada doesn't really matter (although I believe that Trump will win there). That's because if Kamala Harris can take Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, she lands squarely on the magic number of 270 electoral votes.

But that's going to be tough putt. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by 44,000 votes. He lost in 2020 by 81,000 votes. But in 2020, registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans in Pennsylvania by 630,000. Here in 2024, that Democratic Party registration lead has been cut in half to just 300,000.

The polling data, taken together with anecdotal data of significant movement among black and Hispanic voters toward Trump and the Republican Party, creates an unquantifiable but undeniable sense that Donald Trump is going to win this election.

And that's how I'm calling it with six days to go. I'm predicting that Trump runs the table on every state in which he has a polling lead today. That means a 297 to 241 Electoral College win for Donald Trump and the second time in U.S. history that a president wins two non-consecutive terms.