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New Orleans      This is Election Day in the USA.  Polls are open.  I’m calling this election decisively for former Vice-President Joe Biden, making President Donald Trump the loser.  I’ve worked and worried about this election for months and years, but all the signs I see, and many that have concerned me in the past, point to a clear, uncontestable Biden victory.

Certainly, I could be wrong.  I’ve been wrong before, especially in 2016.  I still rue the day I had lunch in London with the director of the Restoration Trust, a former chief of staff for Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown who asked me who was going to win that year right after the conventions.  I confidently replied that I thought Hillary Clinton would win, largely because she was running against Trump.  I added that I wasn’t sure that Clinton could beat any other Republican, but certainly she could beat Trump.  Wrong, wrong, wrong on all counts.

Here’s why my worries have finally moved to conviction on the outcome:

• UCLA’s Nationscape project interviewed 100,000 people from June to late October.They found that men, women, independents, suburbanites, and seniors all report less support for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, as do rural voters where Trump has fallen from 66 to 60% support among men and from 54% to 50% among rural women.  Many of those voters were at the heart of Trump’s base, and they have left him.
• There was a fear that in the pandemic with colleges akimbo across the country, young voters would not come forward.Every indication is that the rates in early voting for under-30’s are blowing past projections.  One-million under 30 have already voted in Texas alone.
• I was worried that absentee and mail ballots would be rejected more extensively than in-person ballots, but so far, the rejection rate in places like Georgia, Ohio, and Florida, where I have little trust in the election systems, are reporting miniscule rejection rates and in some cases allowing corrections for early voters.
• Many of the problems with polling in 2016 have been corrected and even if all of the same mistakes were made exactly as they were in 2016, Biden would win.

Closer to home, my son couldn’t vote early at 6am in New Orleans because he had to open Fair Grinds Coffeehouse.  There was already a line of ten people at his station, so he will have to hit them back in mid-afternoon.  The recent, final texts that the Voter Purge Project sent to 220,000 voters in seven states, red and blue, including more than 100,000 in Arizona, were received with good grace and many expressions of thanks, even though people, especially in the battlegrounds have been inundated.

I also think Trump knows that he has lost.  In union elections, we would always know when there seemed to be “the smell of death” around the election, as I called it.  Trump can smell it now, which is why in the last gasp of losers, he’s called for the lawyers.

His only hope, according to my companera is that this is the worst day when astrologists say the planet Mercury is in retrograde and affects adversely all things technological, including the media.  On the other hand, it gets better from now on, and that’s what we’re all hoping for.

Regardless, my call is clear:  Trump loses on Election Day.