The short answer: maybe.

The long answer:

The anomaly behind Donald Trump’s victory has always intrigued me. There’s a common trap that people fall into regarding polling. It is the received wisdom of the last couple of years that polls can’t be trusted. After all, they didn’t predict Trump’s victory, and they didn’t predict Brexit.

Except neither of those things are true. It’s key to remember the concept of the margin of error in polling. That’s the polling company allowing for a small movement either way – usually around 3-5%. It’s not an exact science, after all. With the lead-up to the Brexit vote, the Remain and Leave options were often neck-and-neck, with Leave sometimes overtaking. Polling-wise, it was always possible, even plausible, that Leave would win – it was just widely assumed that it wouldn’t, fuelled by the belief that undecided and older voters tend to, in the end, break for the status quo. Likewise, Trump’s victory was always possible. While Hillary Clinton had a long-term lead, in the last few weeks – fuelled by the leak of the re-opening of the FBI investigation into her use of a private email server, as well as the natural tightening of the polls that comes as undecideds break one way or the other – that lead had boiled down to around three percentage points. Which is exactly the percentage by which Clinton won the popular vote.

Hence: the anomaly. Clinton won a plurality of votes in the 2016 election. By the numbers, more Americans wanted her as their President than they did Donald Trump. The polling, in the end, was accurate. It’s easy to reductively make assessments on the deepest, darkest desires of America, or the futility of polling, but that isn’t supported by what happened at the time. It was the mystical finagling of the electoral college that sunk Clinton – an institution that, prophetically enough, she called to be dismantled in the aftermath of the 2000 election, which resulted in George W Bush’s electoral college victory over popular vote winner Al Gore. In short, the issue was that she piled up votes in the places she’d already won, allowing Trump to win certain individual states – and hence the Presidency – by the barest of thresholds. All told, 70,000 votes swung the election.

So it’s not as easy as saying that America voted for Trump. But FiveThirtyEight put him at a 30% chance of winning the 2016 election – unlikely, but not negligible, and clearly not impossible. And here’s the rub: that same website is predicting another 30% chance at victory. The New Statesman’s model has him at 10%. Analysts at JPMorgan are advising their investors that the odds of a Trump victory are rising.

And there are other issues at play, too. Issues that investors and analysts don’t talk about as much, because they focus on polling and trends – and, frankly, it’s uncouth. The issue is – will the election be a fair one?

It’s never before been a question in American politics. It’s always been assumed – guaranteed, even – that the incumbent will pursue a free and fair election, and will concede if they lose. They will even be present at the inauguration of their successor – a key symbol of the democratic process.

Things have changed in the last four years.

First, clear warnings about Russian interference in the election have been ignored, reduced to partisan he-said, she-said by politicians and pundits acting in bad faith. While it was initially denied, it was eventually revealed that Russian hackers had attempted to access the election infrastructure of all 50 states, and that they were “in a position to delete or change voter data.” Naturally, the Republican Party has blocked any bills to secure election machinery for the 2020 election. A cynic would argue that this is because they benefited from Russian interference.

Second, Trump himself. It shouldn’t be shocking to call him a fascist, given that he meets most of the criteria by a long way, but it is clear from the way that he comports himself that he is not likely to let this one go without a fight. For months he has been criticising mail-in ballots – which, in a pandemic, is going to be a key method of voting – and has attempted to defund the Postal Service in an effort to stymie those votes. That’s not a conspiracy theory, by the way – he said it. He’s also said, like in 2016, that he doesn’t yet know whether he’ll accept the result, and that the only way that Biden will win is if it’s rigged. Trump has a long history of projecting his worst attributes and schemes onto his opponent. This is no different.

It’s not widely known that the 2020 election will likely be more of an election week than an election night – with postal ballots being counted from all over the country and the general confusion and chaos of the coronavirus having its own impact. Joe Biden will need to win big – incontrovertibly big – to have any shot at Trump going quietly. Otherwise, he will use the post-election chaos to sow discord and doubt – and maybe, with a compliant Supreme Court helping him along, he may even win.