Legendary Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins says Donald Trump’s time in the White House is coming to an end.
Rollins, who is the chair of the pro-Donald Trump Great America PAC, said today, “I’m afraid the race is over.”
Rollins said that he “would definitely recommend that candidates make the case for their own reelection, and when asked about President Trump they should say ‘I support him when it’s in the interest of my state, North Carolina, Arizona — and oppose him when it’s not in the interest of our state. My job to support the people of our state.'”
A realist who is looking at the electoral map closely, Rollins says it’s now up to GOP senators to save their own campaigns.
“What happened after the first presidential debate is every Senate race saw a 3- to 4-point drop for Republican candidates across the board,” said Rollins. “So campaigns are panicking and it’s the first time in a long while that they are being outraised. The potential is there to lose not only the presidency but the Senate as well, and to see the kind of wipeout we haven’t an experienced since the post-Watergate year of 1974.”
It’s not only Rollins who believes Trump is headed for a resounding defeat that could decimate the party.
“Republicans are in big trouble in my opinion,” said former GOP Sen. Judd Gregg. “In almost all of the swing states allegedly in play the deciding vote will be independent women. That vote has historically been center-right, but these folks are totally frustrated with the president. They find his style and demeanor to be inconsistent and he’s not getting that vote anywhere. That’s the swing vote and I think he’s lost them. People have made up their minds. He’s in big trouble. It will be a tough election for the people that are on the ticket with him.”
When asked if he thought it was too late for Trump to turn things around, Gregg replied: “Yes.”
Joe Biden has opened up his widest national lead in months in both the RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight averages with 22 days to go until Election Day.
Several recent polls have found Biden leading by landslide margins nationally.
More importantly, new polls of Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania, three states that will deliver Biden over 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, show the former vice president building a substantial lead.
In Pennsylvania, one of three former “blue wall” states Trump won narrowly in 2016, two new surveys show Biden leading by 7 points.
Biden’s leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are outside the margin of error in most polls.
A giant blue wave appears to be building.
The ratings for ‘The Trump Show’ are in, and they’re down — especially among women, who favor Biden over Trump by 31 points in the latest ABC/Washington Post poll, and by 34 points in the new CNN survey.
By 25 points they believe Biden to be more “honest and trustworthy” than Trump, and by 20 points they feel the Democrat “cares more about people like you.”
In states that have begun accepting absentee ballots, Democrats have built what appears to be a sizable advantage, after years when Republicans were usually more likely to vote by mail.
Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, said his models showed Democrats with a 10-point advantage among the 275,000 first-time voters nationwide who had already cast ballots and an 18-point lead among 1.1 million “sporadic voters” who had already voted.
At the same point in the 2016 cycle, Bonier said, his model showed Democrats with a 1.6-point advantage among sporadic voters.
“Democrats are highly engaged, and they’re turning out,” Mr. Bonier said. “Republicans can’t say the same.”
Across the country, voters in states with little history of casting their ballots weeks before Election Day have embraced the practice as the nation grapples with the eighth month of a pandemic that has so far killed more than 212,000 Americans.
As of today, more than 8.8 million ballots had already been received by elections officials in the 30 states that have made data available.
In five states — including the battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Minnesota — the number of ballots returned already is more than 20 percent of the entire 2016 turnout.
On the political side, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel are all recovering from the coronavirus.
The anti-Trump sentiment began two years ago.
In the 2018 midterms, Republicans got crushed by a “blue wave” resulting in Democrats gaining 40 House seats, their largest pick-up since the post-Watergate surge of 1974 — despite a massive degree of gerrymandering designed to stop Democrats from getting their fair share of congressional seats, commensurate to the popular vote.
“There was panic before the coronavirus started, but now we’re sort of the stupid party,” said Rollins.