Fergus Finlay: Trump-Biden presidential race could bring us a surprise a day

The last time, I went to bed around 2am, because I couldn’t stay awake any longer. There were already troubling signs. There was a huge concentration on the tv screen on districts in Florida whose names I’d never heard of — places like Manatee and Okeechobee. What seemed to be emerging was that Hillary Clinton was doing well in the larger, more heavily populated bits of Florida, but Donald Trump was confounding expectations in the smaller more rural parts of the state.

I went to bed sort of assuming that if Hillary won Miami (which she did, by nearly two to one) she’d comfortably win Florida. But while I slept uneasily, Trump won all over the state. If you look at the electoral map of Florida now from that election, it’s geographically red, with little splodges of blue. In the end, he won Florida by 1% — carried there by a significant win among the large Cuban-American population of the State. (Hillary won the Latino vote, which is smaller). And so he was awarded every single one of Florida’s 29 electoral college votes.

It was a huge defining moment. Florida has swung from Democratic to Republican over many years  — Barrack Obama had won there twice, Bill Clinton once. Jimmy Carter beat Ford in Florida, but was beaten by Reagan the next time. Roosevelt and Truman won Florida every time they fought there. But Nixon had beaten Kennedy in Florida and held it in the next election.

As its population has grown, so has its number of electoral college votes (it has the same number as New York and only California and Texas have more). So it’s a bellwether state, usually won or lost by small margins — 
and part of its appeal, watching from this side of the world, is that it happens earlier in the night than most.

So I’m taking no chances five Tuesdays from now. I’ll be getting up early so I can have a good sleep in the afternoon. I’m stocking up with strong coffee for the night. 

There’s no way I’m going to bed until the outcome is as clear as it can be. Because even though I’ve been up to my oxters in Irish elections for years, I can’t remember the last time a foreign election mattered so much as this.

Over the course of the night I’ll raise a glass to my late brother, Hugo. It would have been his birthday on November 3rd, and he would be as invested in the outcome of this election as I and millions of others are. He lived and worked in Texas for a good bit of his life, and he used to wind me up endlessly about how great George W Bush (a Texan himself) was.

But for Hugo, who loved America and Americans, Donald Trump was a different kettle of fish. If I rattled off the words that Hugo used to use about America’s current President (and that I agreed with), not only would this column never appear, I’d probably be judged unfit to ever write another. 

The other person who’ll be on my mind that night  — and probably four times a day between now and then  — is Nate Silver.

If Nate Silver had called the last election right — if he had forecast Trump’s victory — he would be regarded as the greatest political predictor in history. He had forecast the result correctly in 49 of 50 states in Barack Obama’s first election, and got all 50 right in the second one.

But like every other analyst alive, Nate Silver got Donald Trump wrong. Not as wrong as most  — he did give him a 30% chance of winning the day before the vote  — but wrong nonetheless. So he’s only human.

I actually thought, in the aftermath of the Trump election, that Nate Silver had lost his confidence. His website  — fivethirtyeight.com — seemed to shy away from politics for a long time and invested heavily in making sports predictions.

I think it’s clear though that Silver decided they had to redouble the work and the number of calculations they do. He will, in the end of the day, call the odds on this election. He may not predict a winner with absolute certainty — it will probably be years in America before anyone is that brave ever again — but he will spell out likelihoods.

He has constructed a mathematical computer model that can simulate thousands of different scenarios and work out what the outcome is likely to be in each one.

 On his website right now he has a sample of 100 of those scenarios. In 77 of them, Biden wins. In 22, Trump wins. Only in one of the scenarios is there what you might call a tie — a draw in the Electoral College.

Silver also has a thing called a “winding snake” on his website. It’s a drawing that traces how each candidate gets to the magic 270 electoral college votes needed to win. You can click on each state and see what things are like right now, based on massive collections of poll data.

And if you click on Florida, you can see that it is forecast to go to Biden, but by the same kind of margin — around 1%  — that Trump had four years ago. In fact, the battle in all the states that make a difference is going to be very tight on the night.

And the remaining six Tuesdays, right up to polling day, have the potential to be the most turbulent we’ve ever seen. Thanks to Donald Trump.

First he refuses to commit to a peaceful transition if he loses. Then he makes the remarkably hypocritical decision to go ahead with a Supreme Court appointment. It looked like the kind of decision that could win him praise among his base.

Exclusive: The Times has obtained tax-return data for President Trump extending over more than two decades.
It shows his finances under stress, beset by losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes and hundreds of millions in debt coming due. https://t.co/gstfYLEe5V

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 27, 2020

Then a day later, the New York Times explodes a hand grenade in the middle of his campaign — possibly the first of several — by beginning the publication of a string of stories about Trump’s tax affairs. Tonight will be the first of the long nights on this side of the Atlantic as we stay up to watch the first debate between Biden and Trump. Unlike previous such encounters, this is one where both candidates need to do well, so it will be well worth watching.

There’s a sort of tradition in US Presidential elections called the October surprise. The last one was Trump’s disgusting tapes about how he treated women — and it made no difference to the outcome. This time it looks as if we may have a surprise a day. It’s already beginning to look like the most consequential, most dramatic and most unforgettable political month in an awful long time. I can’t wait!