Trump official claims forecasting voter turnout is impossible: 'It's like predicting your wife's mood'

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published 7 November 2016

Though record Hispanic turnout in Florida's early voting may suggest the scales are tipping in Hillary Clinton's favor, Donald Trump's campaign insists the race isn't over till it's over. In an interview with Bloomberg published late Sunday, Trump's digital director Brad Parscale made the case for why the campaign's "large number of persuadable" voters in Florida's Miami-Dade County, for instance, makes the outcome hard to predict. "It will be close," Parscale said. "It's like predicting your wife's mood. You have no idea what you're going to get until you get home."

But University of Florida political scientist Daniel A. Smith argues that if you look at the signs, it's not all that unpredictable. In a study Smith conducted for Bloomberg Businessweek, he found that "of the 707,844 voters in Miami-Dade, 201,000 did not vote in 2012 — and 127,000 of them are Hispanic." "Basically, one in five blacks and one in three Hispanics didn't vote in 2012 in Miami-Dade and have already cast a ballot" in 2016, Smith said. "I have a hard time believing that many of these first-time voters are in the Trump camp after his scorched earth campaign against immigrants and, specifically, Hispanics."