Silent Voters

My friend William Katz quotes Nate Silver of 538 at length:

Now we are in the post-convention phase of the campaign. Trump leads by .2 percent in the RCP Average and has cleared 44 percent of the vote. FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 46.1 percent chance of winning overall and a 54.5 percent chance of winning on Election Day, if things look then the way they do today. Yet we continue to hear arguments as to why he just won’t win: She’ll move into the lead after her convention, or after the debates, or when people go into the polls and have a final soul-searching moment.

Bill makes an excellent anecdotal about his waitress who after a bit of prodding admits she is voting for Mr. Trump. Bill calls such people 'Silent Trumpsters'. We have seen this phenomenon before. In the big elections of the last few years, the U.S. Congressional Elections, Israel, the UK and the Brexit, pollsters and pundits misread the public. In all four of those cases the right won the election after being down in the polls. Silent voters came through.

Given all the abuse Trump takes in the press, would you tell a pollster you supported him?

Me, when pollsters call, and they do, I mess with them, but that's a subject for another post.

Bill also talks about pundits panning Mr. Trumps acceptance speech. They are dead wrong. Mr. Trump nailed it, it was perfect for what he was trying to do.

So Nate Silver, who nailed 2012 sees where Trump is headed.

Silver and I are complete agreement except for one thing. He thinks Mr. Trump is the weakest GOP candidate. That's wrong. The only GOP candidate who Hillary definitely would have beaten is Jeb! Bush.