Trump v Clinton: what if the polls are completely wrong?

The conventional wisdom has been wrong a lot recently. In the US the unthinkable – the election of Donald Trump as Republican nominee – happened, despite at every stage in the process smart opinion saying it couldn’t happen. Every time in that period I went back to the US, the lovely and informed people in Washington or New York assured me it was highly unlikely. All the money’s on Jeb Bush! Scott Walker’s worth a look! Trump’s dreadful! Rubio’s our man! Ah, phew, here comes Ted Cruz, okay he’s not ideal but needs must! Ah, drat. It’s Trump. How did that happen?

In the UK, the pollsters and pretty much everyone else did not see Cameron’s election win coming in 2015. David Cameron and George Osborne were surprised to win and pretty much only Lynton Crosby and the American Jim Messina who worked on the Tory campaign predicted outright victory. In Brexit, the polls, the pundits and the markets were for the most part badly wrong. Jeremy Corbyn started out his first run for Labour leader last year at 500-1.

Now, the broad consensus is that Trump is finished and Hillary Clinton is heading for at least a comfortable win and possibly even a landslide on November 8th. The electoral college map is against him. His negatives with women and minorities are so off the scale dire, so terrible, that he can’t win, surely? Hmmm…

Speaking as someone who would rather avoid the potential World War III and economic meltdown that comes with the election of Trump, I’m somewhat nervous about this new orthodoxy.

The latest analysis from the King of the Big Data number-crunching pundits, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, is hardly reassuring. If you want to give yourself the heebie-jeebies, read his explanation for why his model gives Trump more of a chance.

Is there a large mass of angry white protest voters who don’t usually vote, hidden from the view of pollsters, perhaps lying or claiming to be undecided, just waiting to give all the high priests of the political-media complex a bloody nose? Anyone claiming to know definitively one way or another is a blowhard or a buffoon, by the way.

It’ll all be ok. Probably…