The classicist and military historian makes the case for the president – and a second upset
To those who see an intellectual case for Donald Trump as a contradiction in terms, Victor Davis Hanson is an unlikely figure.
A senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Dr Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal by George W Bush in 2007. He is the author of more than 20 books on classics, military history and more. When he isn’t writing or teaching, he’s managing his family’s farm. Dr Hanson is also a full-throated and unapologetic supporter of the president. Last year, Dr Hanson published The Case for Trump, a coherent and thoughtful argument for an often incoherent and thoughtless president.
With under a week left in the presidential election, Dr Hanson spoke to me over the telephone from his farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley about whether Trump will win, why he supports the president and how the coronavirus has sharpened America’s political and class divides. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
How do you see the race right now? Who will win next week?
I think Trump will win the Electoral College. I’m not sure about the popular vote, but the more our experts and pundits reassert that 2016 cannot happen again, the more it seems like it is happening again. And by that I mean, more specifically, all the polls that were discredited in 2016 — the Politico poll and the Reuters poll, Fox or the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, the mainstream polls in other words — they have Trump losing in the key states just about at the rate that Trump was losing last time. And from what I can tell, they haven’t really altered their methodology. The other polls, the Democracy Institute, the Trafalgar poll, the Zogby poll, the Rasmussen poll, have him very close, if not deadlocked at the national level. And then, in these key swing states, deadlocked or slightly ahead.
And yet, we were told in 2016, that these were not credible polls. They turned out to be almost prescient in their accuracy. So there you have it.
And then what we’re not supposed to do is rely on anecdotal evidence. But when you drive around communities in America — and I’ve been out a lot despite the quarantine — the enthusiasm is all on one side. It’s all Trump. There’s Trump signs, Trump motorcades, huge Trump rallies.
Because the data doesn’t seem logical, people don’t believe it. By that, I mean that African Americans might not vote just 8 per cent, but maybe 12 or 13 per cent for Trump, or Hispanics may not vote 31, but 35 or 36 per cent. Or college students, maybe a million and a half of them in swing states at these huge public universities, the biggest in the world — Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, University of Wisconsin, University of Miami, all of them — they’re not in session because of a lockdown. And students are not going to walk to the polls after being registered on campus, with the herd mentality and rah-rah exhortation that is normal. They are home in their basement or with their parents scattered all over. And I just don’t think they’re going to vote in the same numbers or with the...
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