As the 2020 election with Joe Biden approaches this week, new insights into his predictions have come from an unexpected source.
On November 1, 2020, two days before polls closed, President Trump called Anthony Fauci, then the nation’s top infectious disease specialist. This was at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Fauci had become the Trump Administration’s leading voice on the issue, second only to President Trump (in the estimation of President Trump and his supporters).
In an interview with The Washington Post, Fauci had warned that the coming winter would be tough, and that turned out to be the case. Describing the call in his book “On Call,” Fauci said that as the call was going on, Trump was traveling around the country for campaign rallies and was frustrated that Fauci wasn’t being more forthcoming.
The president then offered his own profanity-laced predictions.
“I’m going to win this f***ing election in a landslide. Look, I’ve always done it my way, and I always win, no matter what any other f***ing motherfucker thinks,” he said, according to Fauci. “And that f***ing Biden. He’s such a f***ing moron. I’m going to beat the f*** out of this election.”
Trump offered presumptive evidence on that point.
“The smallest audience I ever had was 25,000 people,” he said. “Biden had five people in their cars honking the horn. Tony, you’ve got to stay positive. I don’t want to keep you off TV, but when you’re out there, you’ve got to stay positive.”
It’s worth remembering the context of this moment. Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015 and rapidly rose to the top of the Republican nomination race. As he ran, he touted his poll numbers, growing increasingly confident that he would win. But when it came to the general election, the polls went against him. He began to decide that polls were unreliable or dishonest. If he truly expected to win in 2016, he was in the minority.
But he won. He was polling well nationally, he won some states unexpectedly, he became president, and, perhaps just as importantly, he was right.
Two days before the 2020 election, he was trailing. But he’d been behind before. The polls were showing he was likely to lose, but he was feeling the energy of the crowd. In a presidential election, he had 1000% of the vote but was trailing in the popular vote. Victory seemed imminent.
Or maybe that’s exactly what he was telling Dr. Fauci: He was signaling to him, “Listen to me. I’m not going anywhere. Follow my instructions. I’m still going to be your boss in February.”
The post-election situation suggests the conversation was motivated by the former. But that’s far from certain. Staff close to Trump say he will privately concede that he lost. In this case, what matters is that the message Trump’s supporters heard was similar to the one Trump delivered to Fauci. They are He believed he would win unless something happened to prevent it.
As the election approached, Trump supporters were extremely confident that he would be reelected. His most enthusiastic supporters were the most confident. A Pew Research Center survey conducted that summer found that 96% of the incumbent president’s most enthusiastic supporters did not think Biden would beat Trump. When Biden beat Trump, they had to choose between two options: they were wrong or they were right. The election was stolen. Please come to our rally in Washington on January 6, 2021. It will be a wild rally.
A 2020 Pew Research Center poll found that Americans were split on whether they expected Biden or Trump to win that year’s election, even though respondents overall overwhelmingly supported Biden. A Siena College poll conducted for The New York Times in February of this year found that a nine-point higher share of Americans expected Trump to win than Trump. The same poll had Trump leading by five points nationally.
Notably, in addition to an overall advantage in the perception that Trump will win this year, Democrats were less confident that Biden will win (a 50-point advantage comparing the projections for both candidates) than Republicans were that Trump will win (a 64-point advantage).
Eight in 10 people who said they planned to vote for Trump believed he would win, while three-quarters of people who said they planned to vote for Biden seemed confident the incumbent president would be re-elected.
Two days before the 2020 election, Trump was insisting to government officials that he would win handily, even though his chances were even slimmer than they were before his narrow defeat in 2016. Massive rallies were a sign of a landslide victory. Then, as expected, he lost, and set about trying to turn that loss into something of a victory.
If he and his supporters go into the 2024 election with even more confidence of success, but it doesn’t happen again, what happens after that?
