Ask A Genius 976: The Debate Starter
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/27
Rick Rosner: Okay, so this will be it because I’m pretty tired. It’s about 20 hours until the debate between Biden and Trump. The betting market—I’ll take one step back. The betting markets have Trump favored to win, although it’s not clear if he’s as favored as it appears. More people are betting on Trump, which means that the markets are offering higher odds for Biden. For every buck you bet on Trump, you can win about sixty cents. For every buck you bet on Biden, you can win your money back plus a buck and a quarter. So, that has Trump as the two-to-one favorite. This is based on you collecting on your bet based on who wins the post-debate polling as conducted by CNN.
Which is also holding the debates, but you can see it on a bunch of different networks. So, 75 to 80 million people will probably tune in. But if you look, and I’ve said this before when talking with you, Trump has been in five one-on-one presidential debates: three against Hillary Clinton and two against Biden in 2020. He’s never won a post-debate poll. Each debate had about five or six polls taken among viewers conducted by CNN, Ipsos, YouGov, Fox, and ABC. None of them had Trump winning; they had Hillary Clinton winning. To win, at least in terms of a post-debate poll, he’s going to have to be different in the debate from how he’s ever been before. Biden has been at Camp David for days, the presidential resort, prepping for the debate. Trump isn’t prepping for the debate; he’s occasionally holding rallies.
They say he’s talking to people about issues, but he’s not. This debate is different from previous debates in that CNN will be cutting off the mics of each debater when they’re not answering the question. Trump has been seen to be a dick for interrupting in previous debates. He can still interrupt. He can yell. With Hillary, she’d make a point, and Trump would shout “wrong.” So, he can still do that, and his voice will get picked up. There’s also no studio audience. Initially, people thought this would help Biden. Now, people are having second thoughts because it might make it harder for Trump to reveal himself to be a dick. I still think that Biden will likely at least win a post-debate poll.
Will it be horrible for Trump? Will Trump reveal himself to be the same shithead he’s been? A lot of people think so, but we won’t know. Will Biden reveal himself to be more debilitated since 2020? I think not. Biden has a stutter, so he does take pauses from time to time to recover his momentum. He’ll be doing that a lot more than he used to. He’s got verbal tics that annoy me, but they don’t really mess up the quality of his rhetoric. He says, “I’m serious, I’m not kidding,” and he says that a lot. It’s the equivalent of some people saying “uh” or “um.” It’s annoying because we know he’s not kidding; he’s serious. It doesn’t add anything.
If it detracts from the quality of his rhetoric for most people, I don’t think it makes people think that he’s got dementia. He generally is in command of facts and ideas. Trump just gets out there and spews bullshit. In the past couple of weeks, Trump says if you make him president, he’ll build an iron dome—not literally, but a dome that will protect the US from any incoming nuclear missiles. That’s just not true, impossible, and complete bullshit based on nothing. Recently, within the past couple of days, he said that Americans can’t play Little League baseball anymore because immigrants and homeless people are camping on ball fields across America and making them dangerous. It’s just complete bullshit.
I keep making little $2 bets on Biden. He’s got an 80% chance, maybe more, of winning this debate. I’m being conservative in saying he’s got an 80% chance of winning this debate. A lot of people are still saying, even though we’ve got less than 20 hours to go, that Trump will back out. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking. Now, according to Nate Silver, the pollster and prognosticator, he thinks Trump has a two-thirds chance of being elected. He’s wrong. If you look at poll aggregator 538, it basically has Trump and Biden tied. The polls this year and going back are the worst they’ve been. They’re the most contaminated by what I call liars and lunatics. Biden has a better chance of winning than Trump.
Even though the electoral college gives Trump an advantage that has to be overcome. There’s no way that Trump can win the popular vote. He lost the popular vote by 2.85 million in 2016, and then in 2020, after one of the worst years in U.S. history, he lost the popular vote by seven million. He’ll lose the popular vote again. The one thing that the polls have been consistent in showing is that most people still don’t like Trump. The polls have been remarkably consistent since 2015: 40 percent of Americans like Trump, and 60 percent don’t like him. But Trump could lose the popular vote by five million and still squeak by in the electoral college.
The electoral college is problematic because 40 million people live in California. Trump probably, I haven’t looked at how many people vote in California, but it could be 17 million, and Biden will probably win the California vote by five million. But you can’t spread that five million out across swing states to swing them. We only get the electoral votes for California whether he wins by five votes or five million votes. It’s the same with all the states. The number of states that go for each guy is roughly evenly divided. Last time, 24 states were captured by Trump, and 26 plus DC were won by Biden.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, who do you think is most likely to get the majority of the votes this time around?
Rosner: There’s no way that Trump can win the popular vote. He didn’t win it in 2016 when he was new, and people didn’t know what he was. He lost by almost two and a half times as many votes in 2020 after four years of people seeing how he was as president. And that was before he encouraged people to do January 6th, before he got indicted on four different sets of charges, and found guilty of financial fraud and legally liable for sexual assault amounting to rape. He’s done nothing in the past four years to win over new voters. The only thing he can hope for is that Biden has lost voters because of immigration and inflation. Trump can hope that RFK Jr. takes more votes away from Biden than from Trump.
But polling doesn’t indicate that that is the case. So Trump will 100%, as I said, lose the popular vote. He’ll lose it by at least 4.5 million votes and probably more—around 6 million, with RFK Jr. getting 8% of the vote. Last time around, 160 million Americans voted, so if RFK gets 8% of that, he could get upwards of 12 million votes. Last time, it was 81 million for Biden and 74 million for Trump. So if we’re looking at 151, 152 million people voting this time around—because Republicans have made it harder to vote this time around, because they don’t want a big turnout as it favors Democrats. Voting was made easier because of COVID.
But now, a lot of voting restrictions have been passed in many states. So say 151 million people vote. Say 16 million votes go to RFK Jr. and other fringe votes. That means that Biden and Trump have 135 million votes to split. So it’s not unreasonable that Biden gets 71 million, Trump gets 64 million, and they each lose about 10 million votes. If that happens, Biden likely wins the electoral college. If Biden gets 70 million and Trump gets 65 million, Biden still wins, but it’s a lot closer. It’s around 290 to 230. If Biden gets 69.5 and Trump gets 65.5 million, and Biden only wins by 4 million, then the electoral college could be pretty close to tied.
The end.
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