DETROIT – The polls have been relatively consistent since the major party conventions: They show President Donald Trump trailing Joe Biden nationally by at least seven points, usually more.
What’s more, the former vice president has more than 50 percent in many surveys, a figure Hillary Clinton never achieved.
Is this contest really over?
Spokesmen from both parties rush to say – no! Republicans supporting Trump act confident he can turn things around. Democrats act horrified at the suggestion that it’s in the bag, and stress that their supporters need to get every last voter to the polls.
Theoretically, of course, anything could happen in the seven weeks between now and Election Day. One of the candidates could have a heart attack, a stroke or other major medical issue.
There could be a new scandal, though at this point it is hard to imagine anything surfacing about Trump that would shock anyone. But barring a cataclysm, the truth is this:
Based on everything history tells us, this election is probably already settled, and Joe Biden is going to win.
Here’s why:
In modern times, no incumbent president has come back from being so far behind, so late in the campaign, and gone on to win. There is, of course, the one great exception that everyone remembers. Everyone was convinced in 1948 that President Harry S. Truman would lose to Thomas E. Dewey. Headlines were printed in advance saying “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
But in history’s greatest upset, Truman won –in part because support for a left-wing third party declined at the end.
That, however, was a lifetime ago, when scientific polling was in its relative infancy. Additionally, most pollsters had stopped polling weeks before the election; the one who didn’t, George Gallup, did pick up a late surge to Truman, but failed to call the winner correctly.
Since then, the polls have been almost uncannily accurate, usually within a point or two of the actual result — including last time.
There was also one other case where a sitting President managed to almost turn things around. In September 1976, Gerald Ford trailed Jimmy Carter by 51 percent to 40.
But then his campaign surged; Carter made a number of gaffes, including talking about “lust in my heart,” and in the end, the election was close. However … President Ford still lost.
There was also another big difference. When that campaign started, very few voters knew much about Carter, or for that matter, Ford, who had been appointed first vice-president, then became an unelected President because of the Watergate scandal.
Three years before that election, few could have imagined either Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter becoming President.
Most voters had probably never heard of either much before they ran. Carter was an obscure former governor of Georgia. Ford was the minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives before suddenly becoming vice-president. They campaigned in a world with no internet and no cable news networks.
This time is radically different. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are extremely well-known to virtually every voter. Trump dominates the news to a greater extent than any President in history.
Biden was in the U.S. Senate before most Americans now living were born. He was a major power there for decades, and then a popular vice president for eight years.
Nobody is likely to learn anything stunning, or even new about these men in the next few weeks. These days, while the Gallup organization still does polling, it has grown into a worldwide consulting and analytical firm whose studies of issues and trends are probably more indicative than “horse race” style polling.
Jeffrey Jones, a researcher with Gallup, recently published a report that analyzed Trump’s job approval level, and found that after three years, it has stabilized — at a level of 38 percent.
That’s dangerously low for a President seeking re-election. “Bottom Line: The drop in Trump’s job approval puts him in the company of George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter – the last two one-term presidents,” Jones concluded.
Worse, “the absence of significant third-party candidates that could splinter the anti-incumbent vote … makes getting closer to majority job approval even more critical for Trump.”
In politics, you never say never. But while it is true that while he lost the popular vote last time, Trump did win in the Electoral College, primarily by taking three key states by tiny margins.
Today, however, he is trailing in all three states, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as in Arizona and North Carolina, which he also won last time. All this suggests that at the least, winning another term will be very hard.
It may even be, already, beyond possible.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
