October 8, 2020

Oops, I forgot to write the last week of updates. So here’s pretty much what happened in the last six days:

• Trump went to the hospital
• More people fell ill
• Trump’s post-debate polling collapsed (down 14 and 16 in two outlier polls)
• Trump came out of the hospital too early, by most accounts
• Trump was wheezing when he returned to the residence
• The VP debate was last night
• Some people wonder if Pence has Covid
• Now we’re debating what the next debate should look like

So if I forecast out by 90 days, it’ll be the 6th of January. That means two weeks until the inauguration. So what do I predict things will look like? Let’s see.

I think Trump will lose the popular vote, and by the 6th of January that number will be absolutely ballooning. I assume just about every vote will have been counted, but there will also be a lot of contested ballots. Hopefully the margin makes that less important. After all, if you lose by 100 electoral votes, 429 hanging chads in Florida isn’t going to matter much. (Or “naked ballots” which looks to be the new hanging chads)

So in 90 days, Trump will still technically be president. But he’ll be two weeks away from the end. I suspect the court cases won’t be going great for him. But he can still do a lot of damage in those remaining weeks. He’ll have called the whole thing a hoax, of course. He’ll be contesting in court, of course. He’ll be fundraising off the back of his position, of course. Will there be rioting in the streets, and a coup? I don’t think so. Not at this point. He’s too unpopular.

It’d be interesting to see if he can convince the whole GOP to go along with him, though. Will they be telling him it’s over, a la Nixon? Or are they all going to go down with the ship? And what institutions are they going to try to wreck and ruin on the way out the door? It’s hard to find a floor to his willingness to break things on the way out. Is there anything he won’t touch?

So. The six of January. Good luck to you. Things are scary back here in October, and I can only imagine it still feels scary then.