Everyone wants to know if the assassination attempt on Donald Trump is going to impact the outcome of the election. I hate to break it to you, but no one knows. The only historical precedence is from 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt was shot, finished his speech, and then proceeded to get smoked in the elections
If you’re one of the nerds who is analyzing every poll that comes out to get a sense of how this election will play out, I feel it prudent to tell you to just stop – at least for another month or so. Most polls disregard the Independents’ influence, look at a national-level as opposed to state-level, and the role of third party candidates isn’t factored in. This goes without saying, but you should at least wait until the DNC wraps up in August.
Now, if you’re dying to look at some poll data, I would recommend using the site 270towin.com. It aggregates reliable poll information and allows you to manipulate how you view the data. Or you could just draw a name out of a hat…
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Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. We have had a lot of you write in asking about how the attempted assassination of Donald Trump affects my forecast for the 2024 presidential elections. The answer is very simple: I have no idea.
I can only think of one instance in American history where somebody who was clearly going to get the nomination was the target of an assassination attempt. That one person is Teddy Roosevelt. Before those of you who are pro-Trumper say, “Yeah, yeah, compare Trump to Roosevelt,” it didn’t end well for Roosevelt. Number one, he finished his speech. Second, he went on to have one of the most catastrophic losses in American history to none other than Woodrow Wilson.
So, you know, careful what you wish for. That is not my prediction that this is how it’s going to go. What I’m saying is American experience with political violence at this level is very, very limited. Knowing the impact it’s going to have on the election, it’s not that it’s a non-factor. It’s something that we just don’t know how to predict.
At the moment, it’s kind of in the wind. What I can tell you is that you should absolutely not be paying any attention to the polls, especially now. There are three things in play. Number one, most polls basically interview 1,000 or 2,000 people. They have a margin of error. They say, “Do you want to vote for candidate A or candidate B?” Then they give you the results. That’s a horrible way to do the polling in the United States for three reasons.
Number one, independents, people who are only 10% of the electorate but who have decided most of the elections in the last 50 years, don’t pay any attention to the polls and don’t even answer them until after the political conventions are completed. Now, just this week, we have completed the Republican National Convention. But the Democratic one is not until, I believe, the 19th of August. So you shouldn’t be looking at any polls for any reason until you get to the first week of September.
Second, the way Americans do polling is very different from the way Americans vote for their candidates. It’s not like everybody goes into a single pool and whoever gets the most votes wins. No, no, no, no. You do it by state with the Electoral College. Each state has a certain number of electors. The way it works, by combination of law and tradition, is if a state registers that one candidate got one more vote than whoever came in second place, that candidate gets all of the electors.
For example, my home state of Iowa has seven electoral votes. I believe it’s been a while since I’ve been there. If you have 14 candidates running for president and one of them gets 20% and that’s more than everybody else, they get all seven of those electoral votes. Until you get to a situation where you’re looking at state polling as opposed to national polling, and you can look at it on a map, the polls are pointless.
Third, third-party candidates. Right now, they’re really not included in the polling. If you go back to, say, the 2000 race between Gore and Bush, all the polls indicated that Al Gore was going to walk away with it because they ignored that Ralph Nader was on the ticket in a lot of states. Nader wasn’t a popular candidate, had no chance of winning, and really only got a few single digits of the national vote that was concentrated in enough states that it drew away support from Al Gore and then gave the election to George W. Bush by a relatively narrow margin.
We have a third-party candidate running this time by the name of RFK Jr., who is absolutely a batshit crazy conspiracy theorist. Donald Trump thought he had that part of the electorate courted already. Now, having RFK in the mix means that even in places where Donald Trump was expected to get a really strong win, all of a sudden there might be enough support bled off for RFK Jr. that Biden will get the state.
Anyway, none of this can be registered until such time as the polling changes. That won’t be until September. Let me give you a little hint as to what I look for. There is a website that does all the aggregation for you and only includes the polls that are of high quality. It’s called 270 to Win. It’s 270towin.com. It does it by state. The best part of this website is if you don’t think because you feel you know better for whatever reason, maybe you live there, maybe this is your job, you can go through and click through and change the alignment of each individual state to see how it shakes out.
This screenshot that you’re seeing right now, this is how it is on the 18th of July. This is my last day here. I head backpacking tomorrow, so you guys can all scream into the void if you don’t like what I have to say. Right now, the polls have registered the impact of Biden’s atrocious debate performance a few weeks ago. As you can see, it’s still kind of a hung race.
We have not yet seen the impact of the appointment of JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate. But again, if polls matter yet, wait until September. Look at this in September. Look at this especially after the Democratic convention concludes in late August. I would have normally done this video then, but I’m not going to be back by then.
So this is to give you guys something to chew on while I am doing anything but following American politics.
