I am of the opinion that these political "conventions" (actually infomercials disguised as conventions) don't matter a whole lot. Last night's combined coverage of Night #2 of the Republican National "Convention" on NBC, ABC and CBS totaled 5.46 million viewers. That may seem impressive until you hear that America's Got Talent, all by itself on one channel, got 5.58 million. Maybe Melania should have done some backflips. I wonder how many of the folks who tuned in the infomercial aren't yet sure who they're going to vote for. I'd be surprised if it's more than a few dozen.
Trump's gotta be pissed at the numbers. He sometimes acts like cares more about TV tune-in than actual votes. If his convention was clobbering the Democrats', he'd be citing that as proof the election is over and he gets renewed for another season.
On the 'net, you can find plenty of articles and headlines that say Trump can or will win. They come from three sources. You have your Trump supporters who want to believe he can still win and are trying to convince themselves and others…and in some cases, I think they just like saying it because it pisses off people they like to piss off.
Secondly, you have the folks who want Trump to lose but who subscribe to this theory: Even when your guy is way ahead, take nothing for granted. Act like he's way behind and campaign accordingly. Elections have been lost by folks on the winning side getting so complacent, they turned it into the losing side.
And then there's the Ancient Science of Clickbait. News organizations can't keep running the same "Biden's ahead by 8-9 points" news story. At some point, it stops being news.
I've been looking at the polls and relating them to the electoral college totals and I think political analyst Charlie Cook is correct as of today…
Go through the top-line results of high-quality polls such as those from ABC News/Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal, to name just four, and you'll find that majorities of voters do not like Trump personally, they do not approve of his handling of the job overall, and they disapprove of his entire approach to the coronavirus. When asked about personal attributes, Trump fares poorly in most surveys and trails Biden in most of the categories when the two are compared. He trails Biden by about 10 percentage points nationally in the higher-quality surveys and is behind by at least 5 points in all 20 states that Hillary Clinton carried (plus D.C.), as well as Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those states alone total 307 electoral votes.
Of course, the key phrase there is "as of today." In a normal year, we wouldn't be too worried that something would come along to change the whole dynamic of the race between now and the time the votes are counted. Throughout the Trump Administration, we keep finding ourselves dealing with major issues — like the virus and the George Floyd matter — that were nowhere on our radar two weeks before they began filling the entire screen. And we also haven't been as worried about the votes being counted or the loser respecting the will of the voters. These are strange times indeed.