Prediction: Trump

Trump may not win the election, but Trump has changed everything. And he may well surprise by winning the election.

Here is how Trump can win:  The supposed Democratic firewall catches fire.   Enough voters decide they like Trump-the-whistleblower, warts and all.

Trump wins by winning the normal red states, plus he surprises by winning all those states that are supposedly close:  Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, plus a couple he was not supposed to win, like Pennsylvania and Colorado and Michigan.  The news stories we hear Tuesday night and Wednesday are the surprising surge of white blue collar Trump voters.  The news will be about blue collar Macomb County in Michigan.  We will be reminded about Ford's announcement that they are moving small car production to Mexico and Trump having told them to expect retaliation for doing so.   They like that in Michigan.

People will hear about the surprise number of voters who don't normally vote.  There will be discussion of the "hidden vote".  And those people who were "undecided" decided they wanted change.

There are millions of potential votes for blue collar whites

Will it happen?  Of course, I don't know and no one knows, but it could easily happen.   Trump has used the judo move of turning Hillary's message of "experience" and "maturity" against her, showing her to be part of a whole frustrating rigged system.  He turned her strength into a weakness.  She calls it experience and says she has contacts; he calls it corrupted pay-to-play.

Why would this not happen.  Why would Hillary win, after all, just like the polls show?   Because Trump went just a little too far, and in a world of videotape.  He was stuck with the first impression of being unstable and bellicose.  The revised teleprompter Trump is mostly on message and people like his message,  but just enough people don't trust the messenger.

Trump-ism has changed the issues on the national stage:

There is new open debate over the value of global free trade and the movement of labor.  People with hard-to-get education, giving them hard-to-get licenses as a doctor, nurse, accountant, electrician, or lawyer make it into the middle class.  For others, people not inheriting a big head start from parents, have a very uncertain path to it.  

Trump--the political insider who succeeded in making himself an outsider because he became a whistleblower--said clearly that the system is rigged and corrupted by money and privilege.    Insider candidates were elevated to the national stage by the corrupted system of money and influence and only a whistleblower can understand it and fix it.

Trump has put both political parties on notice that the current parallel structure of the two parties in which each party has its coalition with regular voters plus their elites can no longer persist.  Republicans have religious, rural, blue collar, and Republican-brand voters, plus the money elites and special interests on Wall Street and extractive industries.   Democrats have their minority constituencies, plus urban women, and educated sophisticates, plus their money elites and special interests on Wall Street and technology industries.    Trump and Sanders are making these coalitions impossible.   

One party will need to make full common cause with the blue collar working class.  One party will need to decide how openly to embrace white racial resentment: full Trump or cautious Ryan-Romney dog whistle.

On the message, Trump will win this election because he has won the argument.  

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  Whistleblower attorney Thad Guyer and I discuss the Trump surge and the current polls.  Thad gives a detailed report on what the mainstream polls have missed and why the econometric modeling and the LA/USC poll may be far more predictive.   Warning to Hillary supporters: the poll projects a Trump win on Tuesday.  If readers want reassurance that Hillary has the election won then re-read the Huffington Post and do not listen.

Click Here: Podcast on the Polls, the FBI, the Trump message, and Clinton fatigue