The other day I posted an interview with one of the globe’s leading experts who pretty much flatly said Hillary Clinton has the election sewn up. Now I’ve spoken to another of the globe’s leading experts and he disagrees so for people out there who are totally disgusted with the prospect of a Hillary Clinton victory in November — and I would put myself at precisely 50 percent in that camp — here’s some good news.
This expert asked to speak off the record, but here’s what he said, lightly edited:
To lose, Hillary will have to totally fuck this up, but with her anything’s possible. And a lot can happen between now and the election. There are going to be Wikileaks document dumps, court-ordered FOIA disclosures and three debates.
Hillary Clinton is not a great debater, she’s too robotic and scripted. She’s rarely had a killer moment at a debate, but Trump is at his best when all the lights are on him, that’s when he performs best.
What he needs is a standout moment that everyone remembers. Remember when Ted Cruz talked about “New York values”? Trump destroyed him; that moment got played over and over again and Cruz nosedived.
Or remember when he and Rubio were going at it and he called him “Little Marco”? Or when he called Jeb Bush “low energy”; Jed was red-faced but he just had to stand there and shut the fuck up. Those moments are rare but Trump did it repeatedly during the primaries.
Even now there’s not a huge gap between them. I don’t pay any attention to national polls because they are irrelevant and you’ve got a huge chunk of the population living in liberal state like New York and California, which skews things. And she’s only up by 5 points at the national level anyway.
The whole election is still going to come down to five or seven states. RCP averages the polls and if you look at its site, Trump is only down 2.7 percent in Florida and 3.8 percent in Ohio and 1.7 percent in North Carolina. He can win those states. So yeah, Hillary will have to find a way to lose for him to win, but she could do it.
