Going by polls alone, the race for the White House is a done deal. Released over the weekend, a postdebate poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal had Joe Biden up by 14 points. If you ask CNN, he’s ahead by 16. At FiveThirtyEight it’s 51 Biden, 42 Donald Trump, and essentially has been for months. Which is all to say: We might have learned nothing from 2016.
Chris Kofinis is a Democratic strategist and the head of messaging and research firm Park Street Strategies, which does polling and quantitative and qualitative research around elections. In his view, pollsters are still making the same tired mistakes that they did four years ago. “When we all say there is no possible way that anyone can win under these circumstances, we’re right,” he told me, “except for one problem: Trump has the highest negatives from any candidate I have ever seen in history, and he figured out how to win in 2016.” In the run-up to the election, he said, we should focus on battleground states, ignore the national polls, and never ever take good news from the Democratic side without a grain of salt. I spoke with him to find out what’s really going on with the polls, and whether Trump is going to pull off another upset on November 3, COVID infection and all.
Vanity Fair: What a weekend! How much has Trump getting COVID changed the election?
Chris Kofinis: God knows the race has changed. It’s changed everything in a very dramatic way. The debate for the White House is now about COVID, and that’s an advantage for Biden. If it was about the economy, then we would be having a much different conversation. What Trump’s positive diagnosis has done, coupled with everything else, like his terrible performance at the last debate, is simply reinforce the president’s failures because he failed himself by catching COVID. It’s had a dramatically negative impact on Trump’s prospects for reelection—at least for the time being.
Is there a scenario in which Trump getting COVID actually helps him?
With Trump voters, there’s nothing he can say or do that will jeopardize their support for him. He’s got that 40% to 42% of American voters locked in no matter what happens. And we know that’s Trump’s floor. But the problem has never been: What is Trump’s floor? It has always been: What is Trump’s ceiling? If you want to get into the 50-percentile support range or higher, you have to expand beyond that base. And Trump has consistently divided the most gettable group that would take him to that number. That’s the group of voters who are capable of swinging from one side to the other. They are genuinely torn because they hate how Trump has managed COVID; they hate how he acts in office; they hate how he acted at the recent debate performance, but they like the way he has been on the economy.
Why would someone on the fence still want to vote for Trump?
Whether it is right or wrong, a perception or a reality, whether Democrats want to believe it or not, there are voters who do give Trump credit for the economy. These voters are now torn about who can get us into economic recovery quicker. So a couple of weeks ago, when the debate switched from COVID to the economy, Trump had a true path to victory. As the debate has switched back to COVID, it has reminded voters what they hate about him at the absolute worst possible time for him.
Which is why the polls are now moving more toward Biden?
Yes, but one of the big problems is that pollsters make it sound like the election is over today. You can talk about a five-point or an eight-point lead, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the poll on Election Day. When we all say there is no possible way that anyone can win under these circumstances, we’re right, except for one problem: Trump has the highest negatives from any candidate I have ever seen in history, and he figured out how to win in 2016.
With Trump, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about him, it’s that you can never, never say he is completely dead. He is the quintessential political zombie; you simply cannot kill him. If there’s anything we’ve learned from 2016, it’s to take every piece of good news from a Democratic perspective with a grain of salt.
Do you think Trump wakes up every day and thinks he’s going to win?
He absolutely thinks it every day. He truly believes that. Trump thinks (rightly so) that all the polling was wrong in 2016, so why should it be right now, in 2020? He thinks there’s a silent Trump majority out there, a percentage of voters waiting to rise up like a phoenix from the ashes to save him from losing. He thinks there is a media deep state that is obsessed with hiding the truth. He will always paint a series of political delusions to reinforce his own mindset, and in that mindset there is a path for him to win.