Donald Trump’s rise is explained by his celebrity status and his supporters’ bigotry, but he also is aided by a weak opponent and his stance against globalist economics.
Hillary Clinton is still the favorite to win the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election over Donald Trump, according to various online sportsbooks.
Electionbettingodds.com gives Hillary Clinton a 65% chance to capture the US presidency, while Donald Trump has a 31% chance and Gary Johnson a 4% chance. In August, Clinton’s odds stood at 75% and Trump’s at 25%.
British bookmaker Oddschecker gives Clinton a 62% chance, while providing Trump with a 36% probability of winning the election.
Meanwhile, Ladbrokes has Clinton as the 4:7 favorite, while Donald Trump is a 7:5 underdog.
Prediction Sites Less Certain
The election prediction site’s, which focus entirely on politics, have the election a lot closer than the sportsbooks, though. 538.com shows Hillary Clinton at 52%, while Donald Trump is at 48%. Gary Johnson’s and Jill Stein’s odds are at 0%.
Nate Silver is the editor of the Five-Thirty-Eight blog, which has become famous over the past couple of election cycles for its predictive abilities based on its own polling data. Silver had Donald Trump as a 3% underdog less than 6 weeks ago, and yet he now stands at 48%. It is a seismic shift in the election odds, if 538 is to be believed.
Those in the United States who do not follow 538.com often look at Real Clear Politics as the standard in polling. Real Clear Politics (RCP) takes an aggregate of the leading pollsters latest polls and reports the average. The current two-way aggregate gives Hillary Clinton a +2.1 advantage, as she holds an RCP average of 45.5% against Trump’s 43.4%. The four-way aggregate including Gary Johnson and Jill Stein gives Clinton a +1.1 advantage, with Clinton at 41% to Trump’s 39.9%.
U.S. Election Going to Be a Squeaker
All those numbers show that the coming United States election is going to be a lot closer than the sportsbooks and their bettors believe. The question is whether the bookmakers know better than the pollsters. One argument is that bookmakers have money on the line, so they are specially motivated to know how the election is going to go. The other side of the argument is that pollsters eat, drink, and sleep politics, and their polls are more scientifically based than gambling trends.
Since this is a gaming news blog, our goal is not to write op-ed pieces, though our attempts to provide foreign gamblers insight into the mindset of the American voting public might sometimes give that impression.
Globe Sports Bettors Skewing Democrat
The point taken from the above numbers is that international gamblers might have a skewed view of the closeness of the presidential race, perhaps because of the coverage of international news outlets. These outlets by-and-large see a Trump presidency as a bit of a farce and a bit of an existential threat to the world. Coverage is likely to give the impression Donald Trump is a clown, and a dangerous clown.
From the perspective of the American television viewer, the coverage is much different in the United States. For the first time in memory, the media is holding the Democrat to a higher standard than the Republican. Thus, the Mainstream Media is making it hard for Hillary Clinton to defend herself, while giving Donald Trump a pass on certain inconsistencies in his rhetoric and his past dealings.
Media Coverage in the United States
One news outlet, Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews, has become an advocate for Donald Trump’s campaign. One FoxNews anchor, Sean Hannity, even appeared in a Trump Campaign ad, suggesting Americans should vote Trump. That Hannity was within 24 hours going to host a town hall meeting for Trump was so beyond the pale that FoxNews leadership told Hannity he could not appear in any more commercials.
CNN and MSNBC are seen by many as mainstream media outlets which skew liberal. Many of their anchors, reporters, and pundits are left-leaning. But those same outlets were a major part of the $2 billion in earned media Donald Trump received in the primaries — swelled to $3 billion now. Executives at those cable news channels have said that Trump is great for ratings, so they have kept the attention focused on the GOP candidate. When Trump was imploding, that was bad for his campaign. When he is more controlled, he surges in the polls.
Clinton Campaign Made Some Mistakes
The Clinton Campaign’s mishandling of a number of issues in the past month has hurt its cause. The Clintons are known for their secrecy, so their attempts to stonewall on the email scandal, the Clinton Foundation, and Hillary’s bout of pneumonia caused the Democratic candidate’s support among millennials to erode.
While Hillary Clinton had a 24% lead among millennials a month ago, that support has eroded to 7% now. As a small fraction of independents defected from Clinton to Trump at the same time, many states which were not in-play a month ago are now close to tossups: Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada chief among them.
One gets the idea Hillary Clinton’s lead has evaporated altogether, that the wind is at Donald Trump’s back. For her part, Clinton said back in May 2016 on the Charlie Rose show that the election would be close and we would not see the true picture form until September. Thus, the summer lead might never have been taken seriously by the Clinton Campaign, knowign that 40% of the country is Democrat and 40% of the country is Republican, while the remaining 20% might skew one way or the other, but often seems to go whichever the wind goes.
Why Some Voters Support Trump
For those who think one has to be a gun-toting racist to vote for Donald Trump, that is only partly true. Even Hillary Clinton, in her infamous “basket of deplorables” comment, suggested only half of Donald Trump’s supporters fit that description. She later amended the number down, though she never backed off the characterization that many Trump supporters are deplorable (her description for bigots and racists).
There are the other reasons Donald Trump has gained support. The American middle class never bought into the argument that globalism and free trade was good for them. They perhaps bought that free trade was a good idea, but they’ve never exactly believed that U.S. trade was fair or free; instead, they thought China manipulated its currency to steal American jobs and flood American stores with cheap imports.
Free Trade and Globalism
As for globalism in general, that is a code for internationalism over American self-interest. Average Americans see globalism as good for American elites — politicians, diplomats, financiers, and business executives — and bad for everyone else. Donald Trump is the first prominent national politician since Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in the 1990’s to speak out against globalism and free trade. That has struck home in 2016 with millions of people who are not racists. For the first time, a significant section of the American working class see their prospects as worse than their parents’ prospects were. They are falling out of the middle class and are tired of hearing the same excuses.
You can say that Donald Trump’s economics are crude, and that free trade did not cost Americans their industrial jobs. You can blame technological advancement and automation. You can say that globalism has replaced as many jobs as it has cost. All of that might be right, but Americans still see themselves losing ground and they feel tremendous anger about that. Donald Trump might be wrong, but he’s convinced many that he has the answers to their economic plight.
Such things are relative. These Americans still have it far better than most people worldwide, but it’s not as good as it once was. They see decline and wonder when it will stop. They want to take a stand and there Donald Trump is, saying they can stand with him. If readers in the United Kingdom can see the Brexit vote playing out in a different form in the Trumpism movement in America, then they might be right.
Making American Great Again
Donald Trump is fond of saying he’ll “Make America Great Again”. Hillary Clinton says that America still is great. She’s right; America still is an economic, military, and geopolitical powerhouse. It’s a cultural and technological giant, innovating and changing the world (for better or worse). But many Americans do not see it that way. They see decline and weakness.
It might befuddle outsiders who see the United States in a different way. Everyone has known people who have all kinds of wonderful traits and talents, but cannot get past their own self-doubt. Trumpism has to do with an identity crisis that America is having. That might be astounding for a nation so naturally optimistic, but a lot of people do not have that optimism America had in previous centuries. Many millennials came of age in a bad economy, and that was their first experience in the marketplace. That can have a profound, lifetime impact on people.
Conventional Answers Might Be Ignored
Hillary Clinton’s pat answers might be the consensus of experts. They might have tremendous interior logic. They might be the right policies. It also might be tremendously self-destructive to vote for a con man who many believe is a pathological liar. To those gambling on the prospects, it would be unwise to dismiss as impossible something that is extremely possible.
A month ago, it did not look like the presidential debates would have much impact on the race. As it stands now, the 1st Presidential Debate could well decide the election. The campaign is at a tipping point. When Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump take the stage next Monday night, their performances are going to be the starkest reminder to 100 million Americans what each person represents. It is the biggest, most important moment remaining in the election. Whoever wins is likely going to be the next president of the United States.
