Wave Or Tsunami Tuesday?

 

A loss of Florida's 29 electoral votes ends Trump's reelection effort on the spot. There's just no reasonable path to victory for him without it. The polling averages have favored Biden. At RealClearPolitics, Trump is down 1.2 points. The most recent poll, by Harris X for The Hill shows Trump losing 50% to 47% and the newest Marist poll for NBC News shows Trump losing 51-47%. But yesterday, according to Politico's Florida ace reporter, Marc Caputo, the entirely incompetent and degenerate Florida Democratic Party is "sounding the alarm about weak voter turnout rates in Florida’s biggest county, Miami-Dade, where a strong Republican showing is endangering Biden’s chances." Biden needs a massive win in Miami-Dade to "offset losses elsewhere in the state. But Democrats are turning out at lower rates than Republicans and at lower rates than at this point in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won by 29 percentage points here and still lost the state to Donald Trump."

A must-win state for Biden is Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) and Trump's crooked post master general is doing what he was hired to do: wreck the postal system. Harrisburg's Patriot-News reported that "Timely mail delivery across Pennsylvania took a drastic turn for the worse in just the last two weeks amid a glut of voting by mail, according to U.S. Postal Service data filed Wednesday in federal court. In Philadelphia, 42% of all first-class mail is taking longer than five days to be delivered. For comparison, that figure was 33% two weeks ago and just 13% in January, before a series of changes handed down by the Trump administration led to a national slowdown... In central Pennsylvania, workers observed significant slowdowns due to short staffing and changes in USPS policy handed down by the Trump administration. Despite a battery of recent court rulings order a return to the old policies, they said not much seemed to change." Can Trump steal Pennsylvania? The RealClearPolitics polling average has him down 49.9% to 45.6% (4.3%) and the latest poll from Quinnipiac shows Trump losing Pennsylvania 51-44% (7 points).

Asterisked- Worst President in History by Nancy Ohanian

Charlie Cook, writing for the NationalJournal yesterday noted that the likelihood of a contested election is slim and that "Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes seems pretty straightforward: Hold all 20 states (plus the District of Columbia) that Hillary Clinton carried four years ago, which total 232 electoral votes, just 38 short of the majority threshold of 270. Then win each of the three states that Clinton lost by eight-tenths of a point or less: Michigan (0.2 percentage points) Pennsylvania (0.7), and Wisconsin (0.8). That gives him 278 electoral votes, eight more than needed. Biden will likely also carry two congressional districts that eluded Clinton in 2016, Nebraska’s 2nd District and Maine’s 2nd, giving him 280 electoral votes. That would represent a 'skinny' Biden win." Cook wrote that he believes Trump is losing nationally by between 9 and 10 points, "considerably higher than the 3.2-point national margin that Hillary Clinton had over Trump in the RCP average on Oct. 29, 2016. When all the votes were counted, the margin ended up being 2.1 percent."

A big Biden win would bring in Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, and might also include one or two states from the next tier, mostly likely Georgia or Iowa, although don’t count out Ohio or Texas. Generally speaking, Trump is underperforming his 2016 pace by 3 to 8 points, depending upon the state or district.

...What I am wondering is if this will be one or the rarest species of national elections-- a wave election in a presidential year ending in a zero, meaning it will reverberate for a decade thanks to the coming redistricting. There are not a dozen Republican Senate seats that could fall, as Democrats suffered in 1980, but Joe Biden may well replicate Ronald Reagan’s 10-point victory over President Carter. The odds are it will be a bit less, perhaps in the 53 to 44 percent range, with 3 percent going to independents and write-ins, half of the number from four years ago.

He sees a Democratic takeover of the Senate with losses by Martha McSally (AZ), Cory Gardner (CO),) and Thom Tillis (NC) and possibly Joni Ernst (IA), Susan Collins (ME), and one or even both of the Georgia seats (Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue). He says that less likely but still possible are GOP losses in Montana (Steve Daines) and South Carolina (Lindsey Graham), as well as the open seat in Kansas. He forgot the Alaska race, where Dan Sullivan is in trouble.

Cook says he sees as many as 10 more GOP House seats going down. I think he's being very conservative there are I'm looking for Republican losses in the following districts (bolden districts almost certain; unbolded only if the wave turns into a tsunami):

• AR-02 (Hill)
• AZ-06 (Schweikert)
• CA-01 (LaMalfa)
• CA-25 (Garcia)
• CA-42 (Calvert)
• CO-03 (open- Tipton)
• FL-03 (open- Yoho)
• FL-16 (Buchanan)
• GA-07 (open- Woodall)
• IA-04 (open- King)
• IL-13 (Davis)
• IN-05 (open- Brooks)
• MI-06 (Upton)
• MN-01 (Hagedorn)
• MO-02 (Wagner)
• NC-02 (open- Holding)
• NC-06 (open- Walker)
• NC-08 (Hudson)
• NC-11 (open- Meadows)
• NE-02 (Bacon)
• NJ-02 (Van Drew)
• NY-01 (Zeldin)
• NY-o2 (open- King)
• NY-24 (Katko)
• NY-27 (Jacobs)
• OH-01 (Chabot)
• PA-01 (Fitzpatrick)
• TX-10 (McCaul)
• TX-21 (Roy)
• TX-22 (open- Olson)
• TX-23 (open- Hurd)
• TX-24 (open- Marchant)
• TX-25 (Williams)
• VA-05 (open- Riggleman)