Seven years ago this month, November, I was in New York, heading to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center where Hillary Clinton’s campaign was preparing a huge celebratory party making her victory in the 2016 Presidential election. The venue was a massive convention centre, with a huge stage for later in the evening, and another hall full of the world’s media.
I’m reminded of this as I read the latest opinion polling from the New York Times.
Biden is in trouble, according to the polls, lagging behind Donald Trump in five of six key swing states - if the election, scheduled for next November, were to happen today, Trump would win.
Back in 2016 I took a walk through Manhattan on my way to the Javits Center - down Fifth Avenue, past Trump Tower, protected by a line of trucks, past the NBC election coloured Rockefeller Center, towards the turning where a crowd were watching as cars swung into a side street. It was Hillary Clinton arriving at her election night hotel, The Peninsula. I struck up a conversation with a woman who was leaning over the barrier holding back the small crowd. She showed me a picture of Hillary on her phone, so I assumed she would be a Clinton voter. I was wrong.
A few hours later, the suspicion that a lot of people had made similar decisions, to support Donald Trump, was confirmed when the TV screens in the Javits press centre broadcast an ABC election alert.
And hours later, Trump was celebrating on the stage at the Hilton Hotel - afterwards I interviewed one of his surrogates, a Staten Island Republican called Joe Borelli, who had been at the party.
I left the Javits Center in the early hours and before I got to sleep was called by the BBC editor in London - we talked about how the programme I was working on - How to Win a US Election - would now be quite different. Here it is:
So when I read that Joe Biden is in trouble, it’s difficult not to think we may have been here before. With the consensus that had emerged in 2016, and a story that unexpectedly changed. Does that mean the polls could be wrong - and Joe Biden is not as vulnerable as they make him out to be? On the same day that these polls came out Donald Trump appeared in a civil fraud trial in New York talking about valuations on his Trump Tower and other properties and calling the trial ‘very unfair’. If Joe Biden is in Trouble - despite Donald Trump potentially spending almost as much time in court as he will on the campaign trail in coming months - does that mean it seems likely that next November we will be here again - once again - with a Trump win on election night?
