It’s going to take quite an
effort from Joe Biden to get himself into the Oval Office, and the latest news
this week seems to be trending in the wrong direction for the Democrat.
Biden has been a
bit of a mess on the campaign trail. Not only has he been full of
gibberish, (which is sadly not all that unusual for the former veep), but he
has also displayed one heck of a temper. During one town hall earlier in
the campaign, Biden referred to an attendee as “fat” and “a damn liar”.
Just weeks later, he insulted a female voter by calling her a “lying
dog-faced pony soldier”.
Now, with 73 days to go until the election, Biden has now lost a major endorsement.
The National Association of Police Organizations
(NAPO) endorsed President Donald Trump for president on Wednesday, abandoning
their previous support of former Vice President Joe Biden.
“Our endorsement recognizes your steadfast and very public support for
our men and woman on the front lines, especially during this time of unfair and
inaccurate opprobrium being directed at our members by so many,” the letter
from NAPO President Michael McHale read.
Making the matter more embarrassing is the fact that NAPO had endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in both 2008 and 2012. The organization did not choose a candidate in 2016’s race.
Helmut Norpoth stated that “People have forgotten how Joe
Biden did in New Hampshire,” said Norpoth. “He was terrible. He got 8.4 percent
of the vote, which is unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of
being president.”
So
was there anything any of the Democrats could have done this year to get in a
better position, or was it Donald Trump’s election to win or lose?
“What
the Democrats should have done if they were really serious about beating Trump
would have been to rally around one candidate right from the start and not have
a protracted battle in which people get wounded,” Norpoth said. “They needed to
pick one person and have everybody else take a pass. That’s the only way I
could see that my model would have worked in their favor.”
Norpoth,
who has studied election primaries going back to 1912, is confident of the math
behind his model. While some might suspect that unusual circumstances — e.g.,
the COVID-19 pandemic and the civil unrest in the wake of the George Floyd
killing — might have an unpredictable effect on the election results, Norpoth
said those crises have no bearing on his projection.
“My
prediction is what I call ‘unconditional final,’” he said. “It does not change.
It’s a mathematical model based on things that have happened. The presidential
election of 2016 has happened, the primary results are in. I can add in the
results of more primaries, but even those numbers have happened and can’t
change either.”
Norpoth
also scoffed when asked to comment on the argument that the Trump presidency
has been widely described as being “unlike any previous presidency.”
“Every president is unique, and
I think people get a little carried away with that description,” he said.
“Obama was the first Black president. Is that not unique? If Hillary Clinton
had won in 2016, she would have been the first woman president. Is that not
unique? I grant that Trump is in many ways a very special kind of character,
but I think we also tend to exaggerate that.”
One
model change Norpoth has made for the upcoming election has been to focus on
the Electoral College.
“Now
I predict straight to the Electoral College,” he said. “I’ve never done that
before, but I made an adjustment because of the mismatch we had in 2016, and
I’m prepared to see Trump lose the popular vote again. So this prediction is
entirely about the electoral votes.”
At the core, said Norpoth, it’s just math.
“Everybody
thinks Trump is going to go down in flames, and here I am predicting with
almost total certainty that he’s going to win,” he concluded. “It seems crazy.
But it’s not.”
Norpoth’s
record in the twenty-five of the last 27 U.S presidential elections can vouch
for that.
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