An expert explains why Donald Trump won’t win the election

Recently, Donald Trump’s campaign has taken a descent for the worse. He’s been polling horribly with young people, minorities, and women within the Republican Party. A month or two ago, the chances of a Donald Trump presidency were looking horrifyingly possible. Now, those odds are on a steady downhill decline.

As one of the most historic elections in US history rapidly approaches, we wanted to speak with an expert about Trump’s chances of still coming out of the presidential race victorious this November.

Enter Dr Efrén Pérez, a professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt, who explained why Trump’s campaign has been in decline, and just what he’s doing wrong.

Looking at recent trends, how possible do you think it is for Donald Trump to lose in November?

I think some of what you are seeing in terms of the fluctuation in the polls sometimes is just noise, or air. A lot of these polls are from different survey houses, different kinds of samples – do some of these samples actually include non-whites, or is it just strictly non-Hispanic whites in the polls? I think more people in the mass public are paying a tiny bit more attention, and that coupled with the fact that you have some people gravitating towards their partisan groups, I think where you see a lot of the tanking for Donald Trump is probably in the fact that he is attracting some Republicans, but he is also repelling a nice number of them, and I think that’s where his chances don’t look good now.

I think another thing that doesn’t help him is, if you pay attention to what was happening prior to the convention, the kinds of people that he was getting support from was fairly consistently was somewhere in the range of 30 percent of the Republican Party. Which means he really didn’t have a clenched fist around anyone. The types of people that tend to support him the most are kind of individuals that really don’t have a lot of characteristics that bode well for voter turn out – lower levels of education, lower levels of income, those are the kinds of things that keep a voter from going to the ballot box on election day. He does have a lot of followers, but I don’t know whether these followers are going to make the leap to actual supporters come election day. I think when you’re going to tally it up, I believe the ledger falls on the side of saying he’s not doing too hot.

Do you think that Donald Trump has alienated any specific groups and if so, how has it affected his current campaign? Is it something that is completely working against him?

Donald Trump is not doing too hot in the minority camp. They’ve dug some pretty deep holes and a lot of this stems from how he ran the campaign from the get go. You can’t say “hey, Mexicans are rapists” and a few weeks later say “we were just kidding about the rapist stuff”. He sort of replicates this with a bunch of other groups, and the irony in it all is he doesn’t need to win all Latinos, all African Americans, all young people – he doesn’t need to win 100 percent of those groups – but he does need to capture a non-trivial amount of them if his party wants to capture this presidency. This is how Barack Obama won two times, and if Hillary Clinton wins, this is how she’s going to win. She’s going to take substantial chunks of these types of voters, and this is why if she doesn’t “win” the working class vote, it’s OK.

If you talk to Republicans, some of them are going to try to give you a song and dance – for example, the case about illegal immigration – they’ll try to say his message was actually very specific, it was about illegal immigrants, not all Mexicans, not all Latinos. That’s perfect if you want to mince words, but psychologically there’s a wealth of evidence to suggest that what people hear is that you went after the entire group, and that matters in the following way: Latinos aren’t going around thinking of themselves as ethnics or as minorities all of the time, but what Donald Trump has actually done masterfully, probably without intending to, is made their ethnic identity very prominent, and he’s actually undermined the worth of this identity, so now all of a sudden you have Latinos energized along ethnic lines, and so this is why you get signs of increased political mobilization.

So you know, I don’t know that he’s alienated more than he’s actually energized individuals that are from groups that historically have an uphill climb in terms of being politically active. So if you look at Latinos, a good portion are foreign born, even if they are citizens, the median level of education is lower, with respect to non-Hispanic whites, they tend to be younger, they tend to make less money – all these things, even if they weren’t Latino, would on average actually keep them from participating. What Donald Trump’s kind of rhetoric has done is essentially short-circuited or countervailed all those things, and actually positioned them to be more likely to vote in this election. It’s ironic because it was just a few words, but those words get played over and over in English media, in Spanish media, and the general narrative is, “this is what a guy said about people like us”, and that is all it took.

All of a sudden, Latinos and African Americans forget about differences between them and see themselves along the lines of “we’re kind of all minorities, many of us happen to be Democrats, it’s actually talking about people like us.” Again, it’s language that was formulated for a very specific audience in the Republican Party, but you know in this day and age you can’t control your message so tightly that you think members of certain groups aren’t going to hear it. They have heard it, they get the gist of what’s going on, and they can tell you “yeah, I don’t think he’s good news for individuals like us.”

Do you think that in any world, especially among young voters and minority voters, there’s a chance that he can win?

I can’t predict the future, but based on the data up to now and having looked at some of these polls as they’ve evolved, he’s not doing too hot. It’s pretty consistent with what these big forecast models have been predicting for a while, which was that a Democrat should win, even if by a little, but that it was a Democrat’s election to lead more or less and there are a lot of things to help them that are not Trump-related. The economy is improving, not plateauing – it’s actually getting better, and one of the things we know in political science is that voters tend to reward incumbents based on their recollection of economic performance in the short run. I don’t think the economy is going to tank any time soon, the state of the economy where it is now and where it will likely be in November is actually a good thing for someone like Hillary Clinton.

It’s not absolute that Hillary Clinton is going to win, but it’s more likely and more probable that she wins given what we know about politics and the data that is out there. Sometimes quirky things happen that not even these fancy statistical models can take into account. That’s why I have reservations about saying absolutely, she’s going to take it.

I think people staying home this election day is going to be a big component to what we see. You’re probably going to see an increased turn out in some groups, but I think among other individuals we shouldn’t be surprised if extension is a thing, on a slightly wider scale than we’ve seen it before. We only get two options and if one of the options is what your party put in front of you, and you’re not wild about that choice, I doubt you’re really going to vote in droves for the other party. You might just say “well, I don’t have to give this guy my support, I can still vote for state elections, for local elections, but I don’t have to vote for as a Republican”.

Donald Trump has said, and I quote: “I’m doing great with the Hispanics”, but the point is, though he does get some Latino supporters, some African American supporters, some, I imagine, Muslim Americans to support him, some is not the same thing as a non-trivial or substantial amount. If you can win one percent of the Latino vote, you’re not telling me a whole lot, because your party normally actually gets somewhere around 30 to 35 percent. There are people in his polls that happen to be African American or that happen to be Latino that support him, but I wouldn’t actually make bets on saying that those African Americans and those Latinos are actually representative of the larger population.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.