The race for North Carolina's early votes
26 September 2016
There are 44 days to go until the American presidency is decided, on 8 November. But that is misleading. Go to any campaign headquarters in the swing states, and you'll find out why. I visited one of Hillary Clinton's 33 offices in North Carolina a few days ago and listened to some of the volunteers calling voters. One of their first questions was - are you going to vote early? In that state, which Donald Trump must win if he's to have a genuine chance for victory (Mitt Romney squeaked home for the Republicans in 2012), Democrat campaigners expect about 50% of those who vote to have returned their ballots before polling day. Voting starts 17 days before 8 November; in some states it will be more than a month before. The point is that in states where both parties expect the race to be close - our old friend Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, perhaps Arizona - organisation on the ground could make the difference. The campaign that gets the early voters out, and knows by early November which of its supporters haven't yet done their duty, is likely to win. After the debates are over - whether they skew the contest one way or another, or end up as a spectacular draw - that truth will become clear. And it's one of the principal differences in the two campaigns. Donald Trump's strength is in his outsider's appeal to people who are fed up, or bitter, about "the system" that has let them down. That is the case whether it is because their real incomes haven't recovered since the 2008 crash, or they haven't a job, or the college bills for the kids are through the roof, or because they've developed a deep antagonism to a political elite of which they see Hillary Clinton as the perfect representative. Talking, for example, to a tobacco farmer, Pat Short, in North Carolina - once a registered Democrat - I found the perfect expression of that attraction. Trump, he said, would hire good advisers, put together a team, and approach the country's problems like any businessman or farmer would. With practical solutions. With Clinton, it would be more of the same. So Trump is attracting support like that, measured in the polls as being just over 40% nationwide, on average in the last week or two between two and three points behind Clinton. But that doesn't tell the whole story. National polling reveals very little about what will happen on 8 November, in the state-by-state contest to decide the race, and what lies behind is the weakness that needs to be set against Trump's strength. His campaign has always been a one-man band. The big decisions are his, and everyone knows that although he may take pieces of advice day-by-day on how to rile his opponent the style will be set by him and no one else. Now that he has beside him Roger Ailes, recently forced out of Fox News by the Murdochs over sexual harassment claims, his instinct to play rough will certainly be encouraged. He will have a voice in his ear telling him to be "the real Trump" if he is ever tempted to cool down. That is likely to prove a handicap in the run-in to polling day, because it rests on a belief that he will always make the right call. And it also means that the focus of his campaign is more on tone than on organisation, many Republican old hands having stayed away from his campaign because of their distaste for it. Yet he badly needs a good ground game. Consider the mathematics of the electoral college, with the winner in each state taking all its electoral votes (corresponding roughly to population). The winner needs 270. If Trump wins everything taken by Romney in 2012 (including the finely-balanced North Carolina) he will have 206, and needs 64 more. Where will they come from? Ohio and Florida (where he and Clinton are neck and neck) wouldn't be enough. And the others that have been in play for Republicans in recent elections - Wisconsin, Michigan, Colorado - are leaning strongly to Clinton. Pennsylvania, which would do the trick, seems at the moment to be well out of reach. As Republicans know, it's a daunting picture. That's why talk among Trump true-believers of a silent majority waiting to rise is not enough. He needs better organisation and a bigger army of volunteers in the right places. How they must dream of the Clinton database, which Obama campaign managers of 2008 say is even better than the formidable machine they built, which in its day was a wonder. Victory won't depend just on rhetoric, but on getting out the vote. And it starts soon.
National polling reveals very little about what will happen on 8 November, in the state-by-state contest to decide the race, and what lies behind is the weakness that needs to be set against Trump's strength. His campaign has always been a one-man band. The big decisions are his, and everyone knows that although he may take pieces of advice day-by-day on how to rile his opponent the style will be set by him and no one else. Now that he has beside him Roger Ailes, recently forced out of Fox News by the Murdochs over sexual harassment claims, his instinct to play rough will certainly be encouraged. He will have a voice in his ear telling him to be "the real Trump" if he is ever tempted to cool down. That is likely to prove a handicap in the run-in to polling day, because it rests on a belief that he will always make the right call. And it also means that the focus of his campaign is more on tone than on organisation, many Republican old hands having stayed away from his campaign because of their distaste for it.
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One man band?