The real polls — as opposed to the ones Donald Trump sometimes cites — suggest a good chance of him going down to a smashing defeat. Now, let's acknowledge that it's possible the polls are wrong and also that it's possible that in the next three weeks, someone will come up with THE SHOCKING REVELATION THAT WILL FOREVER DESTROY HILLARY CLINTON AND PUT HER BEHIND BARS that right-wing sites have been promising their followers for a decade or two now.
But it's at least possible that analysts like Nate Silver who give Hillary a 90% chance of winning are right. I'm curious what they believe in those little rooms where Trump meets with his advisors. I understand him saying in public that the polls are bogus, the media is lying, the election is rigged, it's everyone's fault but mine. What do they really think in there?
They've decided not to campaign in certain states. Some reports (like this one) say they're giving up on Virginia, for instance. They have limited resources and using them to best advantage requires that they have a realistic assessment of where there's a chance and where there isn't. When this campaign started, Trump declared he would campaign in California and New York and would win them but he never meant that. His campaign gave up on them on the first day.
If you or I were running for President — and I'm not sure we both shouldn't have this time — we'd have a big chart or map of all the states and we'd mark off which ones we had in the bag, which ones we couldn't possibly win and which ones were worth fighting for. Every time something changed, we ask the question, "How do we get to 270?" But does Trump do that? I'm not saying he doesn't. I'm genuinely curious.
In 2012, Mitt Romney allowed a documentary crew to film in the suite as he awaited the results on Election Night, watching as he found out if he was going to become President of the United States or Walter Mondale. I'm not sure any other major candidate has ever allowed that and the Netflix documentary — it was called Mitt — showed why not. The clip I'm about to link to doesn't show you the full extent of despair and disappointment in that suite as Romney and his family came to see what the outcome would be.
Watching the full documentary, I felt like he really believed he would win and I thought, "I knew he wasn't going to win…why didn't he?" Or at least, why did he seem so unprepared for it? Was he surrounded with people who told him what he wanted to hear? Or what they thought he wanted to hear?
I suppose after the current election is over, several folks in the Trump campaign will write "tell-all" books in order to cash in and to give their explanations of why they weren't responsible for the mistakes. I'll be curious to see what they say was really on the candidate's mind…assuming something was. For now, here's the trailer for the documentary on Romney…