As Yogi said it ain't over 'til its over but...

For four years Donald Trump has maintained a level of support that, beyond being greater than someone so incompetent deserves, actually had left him competitive for re-election despite trailing. However, the last few months featuring COVID-19, the economic collapse and Black Lives Matter protests have now so reduced his support in both national and state polls such that his re-election prospects are, for the moment, dead.

He is not just behind, he is way behind. As recently as mid-May Trump was just over 4 points behind in the Real Clear Politics National Average. Now he is 8.5 points back. If I project the results of a four point victory compared to eight and a half points using the model that I normally only deploy to analyze Canadian politics, it is the difference between Biden winning with about 308 electoral votes including several close states (it takes 270 to win), and 356 electoral college votes, a landslide, where the swing states from 2016 vote decisively Democratic. This estimate is matched by the other key politics and polling website: the FiveThirtyEight blog of Nate Silver, which has Biden ahead of Trump by nine points and he says Biden is ahead in states worth 368 electoral college votes.

There is a weekly podcast featuring key Obama advisor David Axelrod and Republican consultant Mike Murphy (he ran Jeb Bush's campaign). In their podcast released on June 17 Murphy commented on the current polls (about the 23 minute mark):

Trump was in trouble in the swing states before coronavirus. I thought he was heading toward losing, but he was in the race. Then the wrong track when people say in polling 'things have gone to hell' has skyrocketed, and the economic argument has evaporated at least right now, so now he's in trouble in the states he ought to get pretty much for free like Iowa. Now my guess is that in the end he'll be able to crawl to a victory or two but it's (Iowa) in play no doubt about it. Over at campaign headquarters right now - memo to staff -  'we put this guy in ads with the current message and it gets worse'.... so this is the total nightmare.

Here is approximately what I think an 8.5 or 9 point Biden victory would look like:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Anyone know what this thing is?

In addition to the factors cited above Trump's own efforts have backfired. The Bible waving photo op that involved forcibly clearing out protestors has significantly harmed him. I thought it looked both foolish and seriously weird. It suggested just by the way he held the book up that he didn't take the Bible seriously at all. The public noticed. In Michigan it caused a "sharp dive in the polls". Trump went from a 12 point deficit to a 16 point deficit in a state that was crucial to his victory in 2016 precisely because of this authoritarian but ham-fisted manoeuvre.

To recover would require a combination of both strong economic growth plus a decreasing incidence of the coronavirus. Trump's reputation as a good economic manager, which he doesn't deserve, has held up  relatively strongly. However, for the economy to recover the U.S. has to get the virus under control. If the economy doesn't recover strongly there will come a time when his reputation suffers. The situation is better than it was but as the New York Times puts it:

As states move to partly reopen their economies, thousands of new cases are still being identified each day and true normalcy remains a distant vision.

If true normalcy is a distant vision both economically and in terms of the nation's and the world's health, it is extremely difficult to see what might help Trump stage a comeback. The protests led by Black Lives Matter might have been thought to allow Trump to make a law and order appeal as Nixon did in 1968 but it hasn't worked out that way. As Robert Gibbs (at one time Obama's press secretary) put it on another podcast (12:32 mark), "I think its important for that 1968 analogy, he's (Trump) not playing the Nixon character in 1968, he is playing very clearly George Wallace and quite frankly Nixon had the ability to do what he needed to do in that election by playing off of both candidates - at this point David Axerod jumps in - Yeah he triangulated. Wallace did the heavy lifting and scare mongering and Nixon was able to present Wallace as another face of disorder."

This time the candidate who offers a vision of renewed stability, calm and order is Joe Biden. Yes, it is true that a week is a long time, perhaps an eternity, in politics. However, sometimes the outcome of an election becomes a certainty well ahead of the actual date. It certainly looks like that is the way we are headed now.