As the old song goes, “two out of three ain’t bad.”
It’s actually pretty good. But former President Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidency in November are even better, roughly 69 percent, according to the odds respectable British weekly The Economist gave Wednesday to former President Donald Trump of being returned to the White House by voters on Nov. 5.
And while Trump supporters can’t afford to be complacent given the fanatical opposition among leftists and the undeniable bias of the establishment media, that should be “deeply worrying,” as The Economist put it last week, to President Joe Biden’s backers.
It’s important to note that just the wording of The Economist report indicates an undeniable pro-Biden bent.
For instance, when it described changing American attitudes toward the Trump presidency, from 41 percent of those polled in 2021 calling Trump’s time in office a success to 55 percent now, The Economist called it “rewriting history.” A less inflammatory interpretation would be that Americans can now compare the country’s condition in 2024 to what it was through the pre-pandemic years of the Trump presidency.
The publication’s forecast was based on polling results in the swing states that will determine the winner in the Electoral College.
In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to The Economist’s polling analysis, Trump holds leads of 1 to 4 points. They’re not huge leads, but they’re leads and they could determine the winner of the election.
The Economic acknowledged its conclusion is no “crystal ball” — the same forecast had Democrat Hillary Clinton winning in 2016 — but it does pack some power.
In the 2012 election, it gave then-President Barack Obama the same chance of winning as it’s giving Trump now. Americans know how that turned out.
Are Democrats desperate enough to physically harm Trump before the 2024 election?
The Economist cited numerous potential weaknesses to explain Biden’s dim outlook, all of them wearily familiar to American voters: Inflation, an erosion of income visible on a firsthand basis with every trip to the grocery store, is brutal.
“Mr Biden would like the election to be about preserving democracy,” The Economist noted. “Swing voters seem to care more about the price of eggs.”
And then there are the less tangible factors:
“The war in Gaza, which splits Democrats and unites Republicans, has not helped Mr Biden,” The Economist observed. “Layered on top of all this has been some political ineptitude from his campaign. Where his team has tried to bribe voters, for example by forgiving student loans, it has paid off the wrong ones. College-educated Democrats are the party’s most loyal constituency.”
The article left off one inarguably strong point in Trump’s favor — the illegal immigration that has swamped the United States southern border since Biden took office and promptly overturned the measures Trump had put in place to keep the crisis under control.
During the Trump presidency, those measures became a cudgel for progressives and the establishment media to attack Trump as a supposed racist. During the Biden years, the problem has gone far beyond the Southwest border, plaguing liberal bastions like New York City, Boston, Chicago and Denver.
Possibly just as important as Biden’s evident failings, the weapon Democrats have been counting on against Trump — tagging him as a “convicted felon” after a widely disparaged trial in Manhattan — hasn’t paid off in the polling the way the anti-Trump left must have hoped.
“Mr Trump is the first former president, and first front-line candidate, to have been convicted in a court. Yet rather than change their minds about him, Republican voters have changed their minds about the courts. The share who told YouGov, a pollster, that a convicted felon should be allowed to be president rose from 17% in April to 58% in June.”
As The Economist emphasized, it’s only June, the election is five months away, and “a lot can change between now and November.”
But Donald Trump is unlikely to change. The record of his administration isn’t going to change. And besides a much-hyped executive order on immigration that is actually very little change at all, Biden has shown no interest in changing either.
Republicans, conservatives and other Trump supporters cannot afford to be complacent, but judging by polling results and The Economist analysis, the chances of a Trump win at this point are two out of three.
And for Team Trump, that’s not bad at all.
