Conservative Commentators Predict President Trump Again Smashes the “Blue Wall”

By Yehudit Garmaise

  After more than one million New Yorkers already cast their votes for president in Early Voting last week, the remaining seven million plus New Yorkers have until 9pm tonight to head to the polls.

   While, of course, New York is one of the states on the east coast, the west coast, and the Midwest in which most of its residents vote traditionally Democratic, every vote counts.

   In fact, New York, along with other east coast states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Delaware, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., join not geographically, but ideologically with Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin in the Midwest; and California, Oregon, and Washington state on the west coast, to form what some political pundits calls the “Blue Wall.” 

  Although President Donald Trump famously smashed the Blue Wall in 2016, when he shocked the nation by winning the traditionally Blue states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Before President Trump, no Republican had won those states since Republican President George H.W. Bush beat Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988.

      In 2016, President Trump’s victory came late on election day after he secured the electoral votes from the swing states, which vote differently in different elections.  

    The electoral college is comprised 538 voters, of which 270 votes comprise a winning majority for presidential candidates.

   Today, the race in Pennsylvania, a swing state with 20 electoral votes up for grabs, will be especially interesting to watch because Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has based a large part of his political identity on his hardscrabble childhood in which his father lost his job in Scranton, Penn, which forced the Biden family to move to Delaware.

   In 2019, Biden launched his presidential campaign in the Philadelphia and then Pittsburgh. Last night, Biden returned to Pittsburg for his final campaign stop, while Sen. Kamala Harris, the vice presidential nominee, campaigned in Philadelphia, while large screen televisions connected the speeches, the musical performances, and the crowds of the two events.

   Other swing states, with high voter volatility, to watch are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.

    Although many left-leaning polls have reported for the last six months that President Trump cannot again win the swing states and that those states are up for grabs, Fox news contributor and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrinch said this morning on Fox, “These are the same people who told you all throughout 2016 that Hillary Clinton was going to win.”

      “On fivethirtyeight.com, [a left-leaning political website, that references the total number of electoral college votes, creator Nate Silver], said in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had an 85% chance of winning the election,” Gingrinch said. “He said yesterday that Biden has a 90% likelihood to win. These people don’t learn anything. They don’t pay any consequences. It doesn’t matter how wrong they are.

   “The people I talk to, the people at the Democracy Institute and other companies that actually understand how you poll for conservatives: every single one of them believe that Trump is going to win and probably win pretty handily.

   “I said yesterday, I thought [Trump] would win 324 electoral votes.”

(Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)