"IF There Is Another Tick Down, It's A Total Bloodbath" [View all]

Vanity Fair

“IF THERE IS ANOTHER TICK DOWN, IT’S A TOTAL BLOODBATH”: HOW TRUMP’S SELF-DESTRUCTIVE CANDIDACY COULD BLOW UP THE ELECTORAL MAP

The fact that terminally nervous Democrats, still spooked by 2016 and clinging to their rubber sheets, are going public with their optimism is remarkable enough. But Republicans, too, have begun ringing alarm bells, after coddling Trump for four years despite his obvious political baggage. Texas senator Cruz said the GOP could be facing a “bloodbath of Watergate proportions.” Nebraska senator Ben Sasse was caught on tape last week telling supporters that “we are staring down the barrel of a blue tsunami,” putting the blame directly on Trump. There’s a reason Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party’s most canny strategist, is trying to jam through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court before the election: He reads the public polls like we do and sees polls that we don’t. Cruz reads the polls in Texas, where his Senate colleague John Cornyn might lose. And Sasse reads the polls in Nebraska, where Biden could win the Omaha-area Second Congressional District’s single electoral vote.

Even in Kansas, private polling also tells the story of Trump’s demise. In Kansas’s Third Congressional District, a suburban district on the Kansas side of Kansas City that was a toss-up House seat in 2018, Biden is currently leading Trump by a 55-40 margin, according to internal polling provided to Vanity Fair by a Democratic strategist working on the race. Clinton won the district by a single point in 2016. The same internal poll showed Biden’s net “Favorable” rating at 55%, with his “Very Favorable” rating growing 10 points between June and October, from 27% to 37%. Trump’s “Very Favorable” rating has been stalled at between 28-32% over the same time period. In other words, Biden is kicking the shit out of Trump in eastern Kansas. If that’s happening in Olathe, it’s unlikely Trump is faring much better outside Atlanta, Des Moines, Charlotte, or Houston.

That’s precisely why the National Republican Congressional Committee yanked its spending from the Houston media market a month ago, abandoning its House candidates in Harris County, maybe the biggest early tell that red states were slipping away from the GOP. At this stage in a campaign, the flow of money tells you a lot about where things are going. Biden and Democratic Senate campaigns have more money than God. Biden and his outside groups are even outspending Trump allies two to one in the Florida panhandle, which is basically Alabama but with better bars. Biden entered the final month of the race with $432 million to spend, meaning that he’s carpet-bombing every corner of every swing state with TV, digital, and radio ads and direct mail pieces. Black churches across America will have gassed-up buses to the polls sitting in their parking lots the next two Sundays. Trump, in comparison, only had $251 million in the bank. In his case it seems the campaign is running on fumes, which is why Trump has canceled his ad buys in competitive states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa in recent weeks. The president even took precious time off the campaign trail last weekend to raise money in person in Orange County, which doesn’t signal anything positive about his cash flow or the investment sensibilities of the lip-filler crowd in Newport Beach. Meanwhile, Republican outside groups are funneling cash to red states to help prop up their Senate candidates in Alaska, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, Arizona—and yes, even Kansas.

In a “blue tsunami” scenario, one or several of those red states could end up blue, like Indiana in 2008, on the electoral college map. But if that happens—and it’s still an enormous “if”—it will happen because the national political environment aligned with downballot Democrats already doing work in red states. Biden is narrowly running behind Democratic Senate nominees in South Carolina, Alaska, Kansas, and Arizona, and he’s narrowly running ahead of them in Georgia, Texas, Iowa, and North Carolina. “Biden supporters in red states are hopeful,” said Amanda Loveday, a Democratic strategist in South Carolina working for Biden’s super PAC, Unite the Country. “He has given us a reason to be excited by building momentum in these unlikely states. The benefit of having a candidate that is motivating is that they also galvanize voters for downballot races. In 2020 all the candidates are intertwined. In these red states where Senate and congressional candidates are exceeding expectations, they are being helped by Biden being on top of the ticket, but also Biden is being helped by their campaigns as well.”