Life may be full of uncertainties but there’s one thing you can count on come election day, as surely as the sun rises over the Sierra and sets over the Pacific.

Donald Trump will lose California. And it won’t be remotely close.

In 2016, Trump was buried in a 25-point Hillary Clinton landslide. In 2020, he lost to Joe Biden by 29 percentage points.

There’s no love lost between Trump and California. If you ranked the 50 states in terms of his personal regard, it’s a good bet California would finish dead last. The GOP nominee loathes Gov. Gavin Newsom — a feeling that’s mutual — and his depiction of life in the Golden State makes the seventh circle of Hell sound like a resort vacation.

But Trump didn’t just trash California on his ego trip last weekend to Coachella. If elected, he vowed to punish the state — which is to say its more than 39 million residents — by withholding federal disaster aid should California’s leaders refuse to give more water to farmers and cities. (That would come at the expense of the environment and others denied their share.)

The remarks echoed a threat Trump made last summer, holding forth at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course, where the former president explicitly singled out Newsom. “If he doesn’t sign those papers,” Trump told reporters, “we won’t give him money to put out all his fires.” It was unclear what papers Trump referred to, but there was no mistaking his strong-arm sentiment.

And yet …

Trump may have been clobbered twice in California, but he did receive more than 6 million votes in 2020 — the most of any state. On Nov. 5, millions of Californians will again cast their ballots for Trump, notwithstanding his obvious antipathy toward the state and its Democratic-leaning voters.

To Ken Khachigian, that makes perfect sense.

“Kamala Harris is monumentally unqualified to be president of the United States and I just couldn’t imagine putting in her hands being the leader of the free world,” said the longtime GOP strategist. “I don’t think she’s capable of being much more than a county supervisor in California.”

Khachigian has served in two Republican administrations and spent a lifetime in and around politics, which he recounts in his recently published autobiography, “Behind Closed Doors: In the Room With Reagan & Nixon.”

“I think she’s on the far left,” Khachigian said of the vice president. “Donald Trump believes in basic Republican principles of fewer taxes, less government, tougher on crime, stronger national defense, strong foreign policy.

“So based on those issues,” he said, “that’s the case for California voting for Donald Trump.”

He dismissed Trump’s threats — or intimations of blackmail, if you will — saying California’s Republican lawmakers wouldn’t stand for disaster relief being cut off if Trump, indeed, tried to do so. “I think that’s just posturing,” Khachigian said. “A lot of that is just Donald Trump being Donald Trump.”

Nor does he worry, Khachigian said, about Trump using the National Guard or military to punish political nemeses like California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, as Trump suggested he might in a Fox News interview.

“We have safeguards in our system against lunatic things,” Khachigian said. He paused. “Look, I’m not going to defend every single thing [Trump has] ever said in his lifetime. … There’s a lot of things people say in overstatement. … Overstatement is the mother’s milk of politics.”

Mike Madrid sees things differently. A former political director of the California Republican Party, he went on to co-found the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. (He also has a new book out, “The Latino Century,” on the rising influence of the nation’s largest ethnic voting group.)

Madrid says California voters should take Trump at his word. “We have to learn from history, from what he’s done in the past,” Madrid said, noting Trump has already shown his willingness to play politics with federal disaster assistance.

Politico’s E&E News recently reported the ex-president “was flagrantly partisan at times in response to disasters and on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile.”

In one instance, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after a devastating series of 2018 wildfires. Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, said Trump changed his mind after being shown 2016 election returns that showed the strong support he received in Orange County, among the areas that burned.

While Trump eventually relented after “some of the adults in the room pushed him,” Madrid wondered whether “those adults [will] be in the room” if Trump returns to the White House a second time. “Or is the second administration going to be just purely about vengeance and pettiness?”

More fundamentally, Madrid said, “There’s something extremely irresponsible as a citizen to dismiss what a public official is saying by divining your own intent as to what that means or does not mean. All we can do is take people at their word. That’s what this whole system is based off of.”

There’s an expression that gained wide currency the first time Trump ran for president, suggesting the media took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.

Voters should do both.

Every cycle, the polls diverge from the election results to some extent. It’s inevitable when pollsters can only make estimates about who will show up to vote, some people only make up their minds in the voting booth, and bombshells may drop late in the race.

Data from the past four decades shows that the polls do not always bias one party over the other, and that past performance can’t predict how the polls will do the next time around. The polls in the 2022 midterms, for example, were some of the most accurate in years.

To judge the accuracy of presidential polls, the charts in this article show averages that combine many polls into one estimate for each election. Between 1988 and 2020, the final national polling average was off by an average of 2.3 percentage points.

Some years were better than others: In 2008, the national polling average missed the final result for Barack Obama by less than one percentage point on average; in 1996, it overestimated the support for Bill Clinton by almost four points.

State-level polls haven’t performed quite as well. Since 2000, polls in close states have been off by an average of 3.1 points. In 2016 and 2020, nearly all of the state-level polling averages underestimated support for Mr. Trump, sometimes by a wide margin.

The state polling misses have been magnified in the last two presidential elections — two very close races that heightened the importance of the Electoral College. But the polls’ performance in those two years was not entirely unusual. A look at state polling misses since 2000 shows that polls of older elections did about as well as today’s polls.

State polls have missed in both directions over the years. But if pollsters underestimated Mr. Trump in the last two elections, are they doomed to do so again this year? Should you, as some poll watchers claim to do, mentally add a boost for Mr. Trump to any poll numbers you see?

Pollsters believe they have largely identified what caused the polling misses in 2016. A major culprit was the failure to account for voters’ education levels, according to a report from a professional organization of public pollsters. State level polls in particular that year overrepresented college-educated respondents and undercounted respondents without a college degree.

This was less of a problem in past elections, when vote choice did not cleave so sharply along educational lines. But in 2016 and thereafter, non-college-educated voters have largely supported Republicans, especially Mr. Trump.

By 2020, nearly all pollsters had begun accounting for education. But polls still underestimated Mr. Trump. This time, the cause of the error was less clear-cut. One theory, presented by a report evaluating 2020 polls, is that Trump supporters were less likely to respond to surveys. As a result, “even if you control for white non-college male, the ones that answer the survey are more Democratic than the ones who don’t,” said Chris Jackson, who heads U.S. public opinion research for Ipsos. Others have posited that Biden voters were more likely to stay at home during the pandemic, giving them more time and opportunity to respond to polls.

Yet another challenge that year: the record turnout. About a quarter of voters in 2020 had not voted in 2016, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center. And polling had indicated that any new 2020 voters would mostly be Biden supporters. In fact, they were divided between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, according to the Pew study.

So, what about this year? Polling in seven swing states is extremely close — in most of these states, Mr. Trump and Kamala Harris are essentially tied. While the polls in these states underestimated Mr. Trump’s support in the last two cycles, historically, they have a mixed track record, with misses on both the left and right, and some years better than others.

EXCLUSIVE: The world is watching for Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attacks on Oct. 1, and the nation’s U.N. ambassador, Danny Danon, promised it would be “very painful” in order to deter Iran from attacking again in the future. 

Danon emphasized Israel’s authority over the decision on how they strike back at Iran – they won’t be paying much heed to President Biden’s insistence on “proportionality.” 

“We will decide about the timing, the location,” he said in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital. 

“The regime is vulnerable, and it’s up to us to decide which message we want to send to them,” Danon went on. “It will be very painful for the Iranian regime, and they will think twice in the future whether to attack Israel or not.”

Iran rained down some 200 missiles on Tel Aviv on Oct. 1. A looming counterattack has awaited Iran in the two weeks since – and Biden has urged Israel to avoid striking nuclear or oil facilities and limit the counter-strike to military sites. 

Danon said the world needs to do more to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. 

“God forbid, if they will have a nuclear bomb,” said Danon. “We all can imagine what they will do with that. So, I don’t think we should wait for that day. I expect the U.S., Europe and other strong democracies to take action against Iran today.”

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Iran has been fighting Israel through its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Its missile attack earlier this month represented the first direct attack from Iran on Israel since April.

Over the past week, Iran’s foreign minister has traversed the Middle East to shore up backing from other nations, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar and Jordan. Soon, he’ll travel to Egypt and Turkey. 

In the U.S., Biden has come under pressure from progressives to use leverage and condition aid to Israel to avoid further civilian casualties. 

Once a vocal antagonist of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the right, Danon insists the Netanyahu government of today is united – even as condemnation for Israel’s actions pours in from other parts of the globe. 

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“We have no place to go. That’s why we stand united, committed to fight back and to protect our people and our nation.” 

Some have called for a day-after plan once Israel determines its enemies defeated in Gaza and Lebanon. “We can speak about reconstruction only after we defeat Hamas,” Danon said. 

“All of those who care about the future of the Palestinians in Gaza should support Israel,” he went on. “If we allow Hamas to stay there, there will be no future for Gaza.”

In Gaza, eradicating Hamas, which have controlled the strip since 2006, leaves open the question of who will maintain the authority. 

And as Israel furthers its incursion into Lebanon to push back Hezbollah, Danon called on the local population to starve Hezbollah of its power and reclaim their sovereignty from Tehran’s influence. 

People gather near the site of the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut’s southern suburbs. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Heavy smoke billows from an Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese southern border town of Khiam, Oct. 2, 2024. (Stringer/picture alliance via Getty Images)

“I approached the Lebanese people, I even spoke to them in Arabic, I urged them to take responsibility over the future, not to allow Iran to use Lebanon as a launch pad against Israel,” he said, referring to a United Nations Security Council session earlier this month. 

“Lebanon is for the Lebanese people, not for the interest of Iran.”

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Different from its goal of eradication of Hamas in Gaza, Danon said Israel is looking to push Hezbollah back in Lebanon and away from its own northern border.

“We want to go back to the situation where Hezbollah is not on the border with Israel according to U.N. Resolution 1701. Hopefully, this time, it will be better implemented,” said Danon. “We are pushing them back, and I hope it will be completed soon.” 

Resolution 1701, adopted in 2006, established a buffer zone between Israel and Hezbollah, where the terror group is not sitting along Israel’s border. 

United Nations peacekeeping forces, UNIFIL, were tasked with enforcing that resolution, but Hezbollah quickly moved back into the area. 

For the past two weeks, Israel has been telling U.N. peacekeepers to move 5 km (3 miles) back from the so-called Blue Line – a U.N.-mapped line separating Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights – for their own safety.

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They’ve so far refused to do so, but Danon said he is still in conversations imploring the UNIFIL troops to relocate for their safety. 

“We think it’s a mistake [to stay put], but we will continue to do our best to make sure that the U.N. forces are not targeted by accident. But you know, when you are in the crossfire between Hezbollah and the IDF, it’s not safe.”

Danon has often found himself on the front line of tense relations between Israel and the United Nations as the organization has continuously demanded the IDF cease hostilities. 

“We have seen that the U.N. forgot about the moral issues that they have to advocate for,” said Danon. 

Asked if he still believed in the U.N. as a force for peace and security, he said: “Well, the idea was good… Unfortunately, today, it’s being used by hostile forces to attack the victims and not to condemn those who attack other countries and civilians.”