Look, In The Sky! It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s A PIG!

Isn’t that the old saying? When someone proposes something so off of the wall that just the thought of it is inconceivable? When pigs fly! Well, when you look at the absolute trends in the latest polling, His Lowness is about to pull off something nobody who has followed politics for any length of time was possible. In fact, Several things.

It’s this simple, when you look at the top line numbers in the newest polls, as well as the relevant sub tabs. Donald Trump is losing the base. You’ll note that I specifically said the base, and not his base, although he’s almost certainly losing some of that too. His numbers are sinking too low for it to be otherwise.

Look, let’s be frank and direct. Trump had 46% of the vote in 2016, 2.5% less than Hillary Clinton. That included a sizeable portion of disaffected Democratic and independent voters, as well as a nice chunk of disaffected what the fuck, let’ give him a shot voters. But that’s not what he’s losing now. He lost most of those well before the 2018 midterm elections, and we all saw what happened there

What Trump is pissing away, like the wastrel son of an English Lord, is pretty much every single base constituency that the Republican party has spent decades building. And it’s not just the fact that Trump is tanking his chances for reelection, but he is also quite possibly tank the Republican party’s chances of being a nationally viable chance at winning the White House for at least a generation. Which opens the door for a Senate slaughter in 2020 the likes of which we would never even wish for.

It’s all in the cross tabs. Ever since the 1970’s, the GOP has successfully painted the Democrats as the party of the peaceniks, and weak on the military. And as a result, the GOP has owned, lock, stock, and barrel the veterans and active duty military vote. But today, Biden is leading in both categories, in no small part due to Trump’s bone headed reference to fallen heroes as losers and suckers. If Biden wins, and shows his admiration for, and sense of responsibility to veterans and active military troops, the GOP may never get them back again.

White suburban women. From the days of Newt Gingrich and the party of family values, the GOP has owned these voters. And they are the reason that the GOP has managed to hold onto several more rural states. A rural state with 2-3 large cities full of Democrats was just about equal to the shallower, smaller GOP rural vote. It was the white suburban and exurban voters that allowed the GOP to tip the scales. They all deserted Trump in 2018, and were a large part of the reason the Democrats flipped the Senate in 2018, and they’re even more anti Trump now. The way that the GOP has kowtowed to Trump, it is hard to see suburban white women turning back to the GOP as long as any of them are in office.

Senior voters. This has been one of the strongest and most durable of all of the GOP’s base groups. Believe me, I know, as you get older, you start to look more to how to keep as much as you’ve managed to squirrel away. The GOP painted the Democrats as free wheeling liberals, tax and spend freaks, and it’s worked. Not only are they a large bloc, they are the bloc that most traditionally turns out in the largest numbers to protect their interests. Trump clobbered seniors in 2016, which is nothing new, a Democrat hasn’t carried seniors since Noah took up ship making for a hobby. But recent polling shows Biden up by an acreage of 25 points with seniors. Maybe we didn’t much care for Trump and his minions suggestions that we just get over it, go out in public, and die for the economy. This will almost certainly cost him not only Arizona, but Florida as well.

White voters. When it comes to voting shifts, this category falls several steps below flipping Texas on the Democrats wish list. Democrats haven’t carried white voters since Christ was a carpenter. And while Trump still leads with white, non college educated voters, the rest are gone, White, college educated women, white, non college educated women, and white, college educated men have all taken off for the hills. That combination has Biden poised to be the first Democratic presidential candidate since, I believe it was Jimmy Carter in 1976, to actually snare the white vote.

And things aren’t looking so good for Trump’s base either. For the last 4 years, the traditional logic is that Trump’s core base is anywhere from 42-44%. Trump has already shed all but his most loyal supporters. And now, in the last week, we have 3 different polls that show Trump bottoming out at 39%. And all three of those polls were taken after Trump’s debate performance. Which can only mean that even to his most ardent supporters, Trump came off as a loser in that debate.

I know that because the stakes are so high, naturally the onus of all of the attention of polling and diagnoses like these is on the presidential race. But this is actually so much more important than that. Because a majority of the state legislatures are also on the ballot this year. And this is 2020, the year of the census.

And if just a small number of Trump loyalists sit this one out, and Biden sweeps all of the traditional GOP strongholds in terms of GOP demographic groups flip to Biden, then not only do we likely have an actual presidential result on election night, but the Democrats could flip enough state legislatures to undo the horrors of GOP jerrymandering, and reposition the state maps for the next decade. 28 days. Petal to the medal. Nothing for granted, and leave everything on the field.

Follow me on Twitter at @RealMurfster35