Trump Will Not Win: Why This Election is Not 2016

Andy Ostroy
4 min readOct 30, 2020

I am 100% confident that the next president of the United States will be Joe Biden. I am basing that on facts and reality, and refuse to get caught up in the fear and hysteria that consumes many of my fellow democrats.

To begin with, let’s remember that Donald Trump barely won in 2016. He lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3-million, and eked out a paltry 77,000 vote margin in the formerly impenetrable blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Consider that he narrowly won when his slate was clean and he wasn’t burdened by broken campaign promises, corruption, impeachment, a deadly virus and a struggling economy. He was simply the shiny new ‘celebrity’ toy for disenfranchised, racially-frustrated white voters seduced by childish stand-up comedy and Morton Downey Jr-like bombast.

Jump ahead to 2020. Trump is toxic material. Americans have endured four years of ignorance, incompetence, sexism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, divisiveness, hatefulness, bullying, corruption and treason. And they’re exhausted. But what’s critical this time around is that this Trump-fatigue is not limited to Democrats.

If you define Trump’s “base” as everyone who voted for him in 2016, he’s lost much of that support including women, youth, seniors, suburbanites, college educated, minorities and independents and has witnessed Biden appreciably eat into his core male base as well.

Even worse is that he’s not only lost a ton of moderate “Never Trump” Republicans, but they’re actively fighting with Democrats to defeat him. Two prominent examples are The Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump, whose founders include many of the most skilled, aggressive conservative operatives in modern political history such as Bill Kristol, Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, Sarah Longwell, Mike Murphy and John Weaver. Their ads have been ruthless. The kind we Democrats always envied but never had the balls to create.

There have also been hundreds of Republican prosecutors, high-ranking military personnel and national security officials — past and present — who’ve endorsed Biden. A first in my lifetime.

In 2016, Trump as the ‘outsider’ ran against one of the most unpopular ‘insider’ candidates…

Andy Ostroy

Director, producer, podcaster, writer, resistor, non-profit-supporter of women filmmakers