Trump’s growing appeal among minority male voters

The presidential race is beginning to shape up in a pretty clear way. I think it’s important to watch the fundamentals you now have with Donald Trump, a team that is working very hard, particularly including the use of Robert F Kennedy Jr, and the use of former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to reach out and try to create a bipartisan coalition, and in particular, to eat into the traditional Democratic lead among Latinos and particularly African American males. At the same time, you have vice president Kamala Harris, who has reached out to people like former Vice President Dick Cheney. She’s had some 200 former Republican staffers, including number of whom were interns, but some of whom were pretty important, people who have endorsed her over Donald Trump. The result has been so far, an amazingly close, contentious race. It’s about 4747 or 4848 literally that close. And it poses two interesting side notes, one, that if you’re a Democrat, because of the way our electoral college works, you need to be ahead by probably four or five at least four points, maybe five points, because you’re going to get huge margins of popular vote in California, New York and Illinois. Now that doesn’t particularly help you in the Electoral College. The it doesn’t matter in California whether you carry it by one vote or 3 million votes. It’s still the same number of electoral college votes. Same thing for Illinois, same thing for New York. So in a strange way, Republican votes are spread out in states to make them more competitive and at 4747 or 4848 the Republicans actually have a net advantage in carrying the swing states, the most important of which is Pennsylvania. It’s simply a mathematical fact that if vice president Harris can’t carry Pennsylvania, where she has significant problems, both because she skipped over their governor in picking a vice presidential candidate, and because fracking and developing oil and gas in western Pennsylvania is an enormous industry, and there’s a sense that she’s anti fracking and anti oil and gas, and that really is going To cost her. The key used to be for Democrats to come out of Philadelphia with a huge margin, lose in the middle of the state and small towns and rural areas, and then finish up in Pittsburgh with a pretty good sized margin. Well, you start losing western Pennsylvania and the center of the state, you have to have an enormous margin in Philadelphia for this to work, and the danger for them now is that as Trump continues to appeal to working Latinos and working African American males in particular, that they may not get the margin that they need in Philadelphia to offset the liabilities they’re going to Have everywhere else in the state. Now there are similar patterns in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Georgia, North Carolina, in Nevada and Arizona. Those are the key swing states, and at the present time, they’re all very competitive. Trump tends to have a slight advantage in most of them. Goes back a little back and forth, a little bit every week, but that’s where to look forward to see what’s going to happen. And if you don’t see vice president Harris beginning to pull away in the popular vote, you’ll know by early October that she’s going to be in significant trouble and have a very difficult time getting the electoral college majority that she needs. So the race is developing. I think the debate turned out not to change many opinions. They were basically about 4747 when they went in, they came out, they were at 4848 so could hardly be tighter than it is right now, and I think that that’s likely to continue all the way up to election day. And remember, in the American system, our actual voting period is longer than the elections. In many countries, if you go to a place like France, for example, they had a three week election, the total campaign, and then they have one day of voting period. Well, in some of our states, we start voting in mid September. It’s a very, very different environment, but I think it’ll be exciting, and I’ll be reporting later on more about what’s happening in the presidential race.