Partner Terry Sullivan Shares His Final 2020 Election Predictions With POLITICO

November 3, 2020

4 GOP Campaign Chiefs Make Their Final Election Predictions. They’re as Divided as the Country.

They battled Donald Trump and lost. Despite the polls, a couple of them think he could pull out a surprise win again.

Election Day is here—and with it, the chance to look very smart (or very stupid) by sharing predictions about who wins the presidency.

For the past couple of election cycles, I’ve enjoyed privately comparing my own prognostications with those of my best sources. This year we’re making those election forecasts public. And we’re doing so with a special group—four members of the small fraternity of people who have tried to defeat Donald Trump in the past.

In June 2019, I convened a roundtable discussion—in an actual smoke-filled room in Washington—with four of the Republican Party’s 2016 campaign managers: Danny Diaz (Jeb Bush), Beth Hansen (John Kasich), Jeff Roe (Ted Cruz) and Terry Sullivan (Marco Rubio). The idea was to draw from their experiences competing against Trump, and against each other, to handicap the Democratic primary and discuss which candidate might have the best odds against Trump in November 2020.

That conversation was so interesting that we decided to get the gang back together a few months later, at the Texas Tribune Festival, for a discussion of Biden’s flagging candidacy and how he might stop the bleeding. Then, in April of 2020, we adapted to the pandemic by holding our inaugural “Smoke Filled Zoom,” recapping the abrupt conclusion of the Democratic primary and weighing the political implications of Covid-19. Finally, just before Labor Day, we reassembled over the web to break down the party conventions, the Biden-Trump matchup and the potential October surprises that awaited.

Given this group’s documented, 18-month-long discussion of the race, it was only appropriate to bring everyone together one last time and compare predictions. In this fifth and final installment of our campaign manager roundtable, these four elder statesmen of the GOP debate which party will control the Senate next year, which states Trump can hang onto and who will win the Electoral College. We also addressed the question on the minds of so many Americans: If Trump loses, but refuses to concede, what happens next?

Read the full analysis here.