Jay Weber show transcript 10/19/20 7:13am
I’m starting to get the question that I get before every election from listeners-via email: be honest....is Trump going to win this, or not?
Listeners want reassurances and think i might have a private view that I’m withholding from the audience.
I assure you, I’m not.
This race could absolutely go either way. We keep getting evidence that this is going to be a high turnout race and Joe Biden is leading in all of the important battleground states and so the Dems are confident he’s going to win, already...
But i can point out a counter-indicator for every belief they are working off of.
So much depends on what voters actually show up and how accurate the polls are that there’s no way to predict this. Sure, I could see a Biden landslide in the cards, if the polls and turnout models are correct. I could also see a Trump landslide in the cards...if the polls and turnout models are wrong and i could see a very close race that could flop either way.....
Which is the most likely scenario at the moment. I’ve never spoken to so many insiders who say, jay. Genuinely. This is a tossup. If a few thousand voters move one way in Penn and WI, Trump wins. If they move the other way, Trump loses. If a few thousand voters move one way in Arizona or Michigan, Trump wins by a landslide. If they move the other way- Biden wins by a landslide.
This is -impossible- to predict right now, my friends.
For example: long lines and big early voting numbers would normally point to a high turnout election. Predictions are that it could be the highest turnout, ever.
Conventional wisdom would be that that benefits the democrats, then. But it could also speak to a unique enthusiasm for trump after the democrats and the media has been more vile than ever to him for four years....but 6 in 10 voters say they are better off.
Then there are the questions looming over mail-in balloting and how much loss or tampering goes on there.
As for a Trump loss- the polls have shown him losing among seniors and suburban women. Those are two large voting demos. So, if that’s true, and trump sees big erosion among seniors and suburban women- yep. He’ll lose.
For example...in 2016...trump won seniors by seven percent. Now NBC polling claims Biden is winning seniors by ten points.
Well-that’s a 17 point swing in seniors-as the largest voting bloc in America. If that turns out to be the case...no number of additional minority voters would make up for that divide. Trump loses.
But-if the seniors and suburban moms come back around....or the polls are wrong...and trump has slightly more Hispanic and Black voters than he had in 2016-which it seems he will- he coasts to victory.
Or- this map could come down to one state: Pennsylvania. Did Biden do enough to lure more union voters back to the democrats? If so- and Trump loses Pennsylvania it’s very difficult to see how he wins without winning both Michigan and WI...or Minnesota.
There are so many ‘ifs’....not a single insider really knows which way this is going to go.
And i-and my gut- keep coming back to the enthusiasm gap. I still believe there’s a chance that all sorts of more moderate, Middle America democrats-do- stay home...because Biden doesn’t excite them and things are going okay under trump.
If i had to bet today, I’dbet that is going to happen: that after all of the hype and build up over record numbers of trump haters coming out to push him out of office...that there’s actually another Hillary-type power outage on the left...and they don’t see the massive turnout they expect.My gut tells me that that is what’s going to occur.
But- remember-as of today, my republican friends, you can vote in-person absentee.Vote early, in person, and make sure your vote is in and gets counted. You can do that-starting today.
This weekend-president Trump hit four states- as Joe Biden hid in his basement. Again.
So trump is out there- hammering away- and Joe is in his slippers at home. Two weeks before Election Day, Joe Biden took the weekend off.
But hey, folks-the democrats are certain. Certain. That they have this election already wrapped up. The network polls that are oversampling democrats to a large degree have Biden out in front by ten points...and i swear...there is a good chance this backfires on them.
If the message goes out that Biden has this in the bag, all sorts of young and minority voters, in particular, could just skip voting and stay home.
Young voters- especially young minority voters-are not excited about Joe Biden.They have no fire in their belly when it comes to another contest between old white guys....
And this notion -two weeks out-that Biden already has it in the bag could backfire.
In fact-i hope you saw that on Friday- Biden’s campaign team...as they hid Joe away from questions about hunter for a third day in a row- also said that they believe this race is much closer than the polls would indicate.
And by all honest accounts, it is. We’ll get into that later..
But...trump is out campaigning like mad...because even his own internal polls show him behind-but close-in all of the important swing states.....
Whereas, the Biden team is still following their initial plan of keeping Joe Biden out of the public eye as much as possible.
This is a truly bizarre year.
I have no doubt that if Joe Biden would have been forced to run a traditional campaign, there is no way this race would even be close. He would have exposed himself as physically and mentally not up to this job...and trump would be headed to a second term-by default.
But- a truncated primary season and the covid-19 shutdowns have given the democrats the perfect way to hide away their -clearly- substandard candidate.
And they believe the strategy has already worked. They’ve got to figure that if ole feeble Joe can get past this week’s final debate without a huge incident...that he’ll coast to victory.
Meanwhile-trump’s crowds have never been larger or louder. They are-genuinely-unlike anything seen in American politics.
So- is this trump movement just a cult? Where one third of the country-really, really-likes this guy?But the other two thirds hate him?
That would be the explanation for the huge crowds leading into a trump loss, wouldn’t it?
That trump has a rabid core of supporters who are akin to a cult. They’ll show up big and fawn over him-and yet- two thirds of the country hates the guy.
So is it that? Or is it that the polls are wrong?
I’d also suggest a third possibility: it could be that both things can be explained by the national map. The map that shows a sea of red across much of the country...in the rural areas...but with the coastal states and big city areas being blue.
It might -genuinely be- that there are more democrats in those heavily populated areas who can swamp us under in the rest of the more rural states and suburban areas. That might explain it, as well.
But trump said at his rally in Janesville that Wisconsin is the key to winning re-election. I know they want that to be the impression so that you all are super-motivated to vote and take a trump-supporting friend with you.
But the truth is that Wisconsin-is not-the key to everything. Pennsylvania is.
The trump campaign has three or four scenarios in which he can win re-election without Wisconsin. After all, it’s only ten electoral votes.
Last week, we had Reince Priebus on, and he admitted Arizona and Michigan are more important...because they mean more electoral votes than Wisconsin.
But winning this state again would-absolutely- help.
And to me, the key is how motivated liberal minority voters are to vote verus how motivated rural farmers are to vote. Can the super-energized farmers in central and northern Wisconsin vote in numbers that offset any increase in minority or suburban mom votes that we might see for Joe Biden?
That’s the key to Wisconsin.
Then there’s the late money spending advantage that Biden has. It is also like nothing we have ever seen before.
But-didn’t I tell you? The democrats -always-find the money?
As trump and the RNC were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of the last two years and the democrats weren’t raising diddly- my take is what it has been for 20 years on this radio station: democrats always find the money. Their big donors, unions, and grassroots organizations-always- flood them with money.
And it is, often, last minute.
Such was the case this time.
And -as Brad Parscale, trump’s first campaign manager, was spending way too much of their money raised-way too early-the democrats came in with a massive, late, flood of hundreds of millions of dollars that has Biden with huge ‘ad dominance’ thru all of Sept and October.
What that ratio means is-if you take all of the third parties out of the mix that have been spending on trump’s behalf- what you have is a trump campaign that has spent very little in Wisconsin...and has been outspent five to one by the Biden campaign.
But Biden clearly has the ad advantage.
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