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Where’s The Trump Base?

September 15, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , Leave a comment

              Want to know how Joe and Kammie are really doing in the 2020 race?  Don’t spend all you time poll-watching in the so-called ‘battleground’ states. Spend a few minutes looking at the polls in the really red states.

              I’m talking about states like South Dakota, Montana, Missouri, Tennessee, places like that. These are states where the GOP could literally run a piece of dog shit for President and the dog shit would still win.

              Here’s a graph which compares the percentage of votes that Trump received in 2016 versus what he would get if the 2020 election were held today:

              The reason that none of these states are considered ‘battleground’ or ‘swing’ states is because if a Democratic Presidential candidate ever won in any of them, it was before I was born. And this chart only contains states for which there have been enough polls to make a credible comparison between four year ago and today.

              So, for example, this chart doesn’t contain such red-only states like West Virginia (the dumbest of the dumb states) because the last poll held in West Virginia was on January 8th. In that survey, Trump had a 66-31 lead over Joe, a gap that was slightly less than the 68-24 gap that he enjoyed against Hillary in 2016.  Or take a state like Nebraska, where Trump got 58.5% of the vote in 2016 and where the only 2020 poll taken in August shows him ahead of Joe, 48-46. But again, one poll doth not a prediction make.

              So let’s go back to those 8 reliable Republican states where we have enough poll data to make a valid comparison between he campaign of 2016 and the 2020 campaign. Frankly, if I were trying to figure out a re-election strategy for #45, I would be as much or even more concerned about the poll results from these states than what we are seeing in the so-called ‘battleground’ states.

              First and most important is the fact that the overall gap in the 12 battleground states is less than 3 points – Joe’s average is 48.06%, Trump’s at 45.17%. If Trump were to take two-thirds of the dog-shit votes in all those states, he would win again.  On the other hand, in the 8 really red states, Trump’s average is 52.36%, compared to the 57.78% of the votes that were cast in 2016. 

I’m not saying that Joe can flip any of those states, his average polling number is 41.48%. But the fact that Trump’s support in his strongest states has eroded over the past four years, tells me that all the talk about the so-called ‘loyalty’ of his base is just wishful talk. Back in 2016, Hillary rolled up a whole, big 37% average in those 8 deep-red states. In other words, Joe is now registering 12% more support and Trump is pulling 10% less in the dumbest states.

And by the way, before you start thinking that I’m over-stating the problem for Trump, think about this. In 2016, the dog-shit vote was 5.22%; right now it’s basically the same – 6.15%. So this year there’s no more wiggle room than there was in 2016. This year Trump’s numbers in his strongest states will come in below where they were when he ran for the first time.

If Trump’s numbers were holding steady this time around, then the Biden threat wouldn’t mean much at all. But his numbers aren’t holding, not just in the battleground states, but in all states. And it’s one thing to convince voters who haven’t made up their minds to pull your lever or check your box. It’s quite another to make people who no longer support you to come back to the fold.

You don’t make that argument by telling everyone how great you are because they’ve already decided that you’re not so great. You have to make them understand that the candidate they are now supporting represents all kinds of dangers which perhaps they don’t understand.

With 7 weeks to go in this campaign, does Trump have any more desperate, anti-Biden assaults up his sleeve? Don’t worry, he’ll try something.

Is There A Way For Trump To Win?

September 14, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 2 Comments

              If I feel a total contempt for anyone active in the political arena these days, it’s not the politicians themselves, not even Donald Trump. The ones I believe are the worst of all the worst are political commentators, op-ed writers and consultants who started out as liberals and then went the other way.

People like Geraldo and Juan Williams really make my skin crawl because if you decide that liberalism isn’t your bag, that’s fine. So go do something else. Make a pizza, drive a cab, lay brick, but don’t turn around and help out the other side. Particularly when the other side is led by someone named – ucchh – I can’t even say his friggin’ name.

              Another member of the turncoat group is Doug Schoen. He flitted in and out of the Clinton orbit and has also done consulting work for Bloomberg’s brief Presidential campaign. But the bottom line is that he’s a Republican, and his true colors are on display in a piece in The Hill which basically says that you-know-who still has a good chance of winning the Presidential race.

              Here’s the basic argument that Schoen makes about the polls: “While Biden leads nationally and in several battleground states, many of his leads in swing states are even tighter than they were for Hillary Clinton in 2016, notably in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida, all states that she lost.” He then notes that Arizona has become a clear battleground state, ditto Florida where the Cook Report now rates as a ‘toss-up’ rather than a Biden ‘lean.’

              What Schoen forgets to mention is that Biden doesn’t need Florida or Arizona. He doesn’t even need Nevada where Trump appeared today before his usual Nuremburg-type crowd. Unless something really crazy happens in the Commie/Socialist/Sanctuary/BLM states, Joe needs 50% plus 1 in Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and PA. That’s it. Fartig – finished. Done.

              As for Schoen’s missive, either he doesn’t know how to read polls, or he’s lying, or both. When he says that Joe’s lead in states like Michigan and PA is smaller than what Hillary enjoyed at the same time in 2016, he’s only referring to the gap in the percentage of poll respondents who indicated for whom they were going to vote.

              Right now, Joe has a 6.5-point lead in Michigan and a 5.0 lead in PA. At this date in 2016, Clinton had bigger leads in both states but, and this is a very important but, the dog-shit responses in both states (i.e., other named candidates or not yet sure) was twice as high for Hillary as it now is for Joe. If Trump were to grab every voter who says he or she is voting Libertarian plus half the voters who still can’t figure anything out, he would still lose both states.

              Most of Schoen’s column is spent talking about the growth of Hispanic support for Trump in Florida, particularly in Miami Dade County. The same day that Schoen’s column appeared, the Florida Lt. Governor announced that Trump has really ‘delivered’ to the Latino community, and that his popularity is based on the fact that “Latinos care about faith, they care about family and they care about freedom, and Joe Biden doesn’t stand for any of those things.”

              Know what else Trump has delivered to Miami Dade County? A death-rate from Covid-19 which is twice as high as the death rate in Florida as a whole. Miami Dade County represents 10% of the state’s total population and the virus mortality number is at 2,900 out of 12,800 statewide virus deaths.

              But let’s say that even with the pandemic in Florida not being under control, that Biden is simply too much of a Socialist for the Latino population this year. So what? He doesn’t need Florida and by the way, the statewide polls for Arizona, which also has a large Latino population, happen to be running stronger for Joe.

              Here’s how the battleground looks today:

              Joe is at or almost at the magic 50-mark in 5 states. Both guys have dropped a tiny bit in several states and pushed up a bit in several other states. Bottom line: nothing has changed. But the most important news is that together, the dog-shit number in all 12 states is under 7. Which means that in order for you-know-who to get re-elected, he has to convince a bunch of Biden supporters to switch to him. 

              That’s what makes the 2020 campaign so different from 2016.

Here’s The Real Presidential Campaign.

September 12, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , Leave a comment

              I don’t want to give Joe and Kammie what my beloved grandmother would call a kinehora, which means ‘evil eye,’ but I am beginning to believe that the only reason we still think there’s a Presidential contest going on is because there are lots of people, groups and media venues out there which exist only because they can make us believe that the race is still not done.

              On June 1st, Joe had a 6.2% lead over him, and his lead has remained at or above that margin ever since. How big is that lead? For all the talk about how Hillary won the popular vote in 2016, her winning margin was 2.10%. And by the way, the aggregate national polls in 2016 had the final numbers exactly right.

              Now let’s look at those ‘critical’ swing states. Right now Joe has 223 electoral votes coming from 21 Communist/Fascist/Terrorist/Sanctuary states. Oregon, on the other hand, is rated as a ‘likely’ but not certain blue state. Meanwhile, the first state-wide Oregon poll since June was published yesterday and Joe’s lead was only 12 points. Of course, maybe there are all kinds of hidden Trump votes in a state where 500,000 people have been forced to evacuate their homes, yet the President hasn’t said one, single word about the fires. Oregon’s only a ‘likely’ blue state. Yea, right.

              There are 4 states – Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – which total 50 electoral votes. Joe gets those 4 states and he doesn’t need Florida, or Georgia, or North Carolina, or Texas, or any of the other states where he’s either even or just slightly below Trump in the statewide vote. Yesterday the Cook Report made headlines by moving Florida back into the toss-up category. Good. Let all the shuffleboard players at The Villages vote for Trump.

              Next weekend, Trump has a rally planned in the town of Mosinee, WI, which is about as far away from Kenosha as you can get. He’ll fly into a local airport, harangue a thousand or so folks about how Biden and the Democrats will turn America into Venezuela, and that will be that. Meanwhile, the latest polls show that his numbers went down after he visited Kenosha, not up.

              Know what Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have in common? They’re all Big 10 states. Back on August 5th, the Conference published its 2020 football schedule, noting that the teams would only play other Big 10 teams this year in order to minimize health issues arising from Covid-19. A week later, the Presidents of the Big-10 schools voted to cancel the entire season with the hopes that games might be played next Spring.

              Know why Trump is claiming he downplayed the virus threat to ‘protect’ America from the Chinese flu? Because he couldn’t figure out how to blame Joe, Nancy, and the rest of the radical-left Democrats for 1,000 Covid-19 deaths every day. Believe me, if he couldda, he wouldda.  

              One more thing about the swing-state vote needs to be said. I’ve said it before but it needs to be said again, and again, and again.

              In 2012, Obama received 7,175,828 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and PA, Romney got 6,203,656 in those same states.  In 2016, Hillary received 6,577,816 votes in those three states, a drop of 8%. Trump got 6,655,560 votes in those states in 2016, an increase of 7%. America and the entire world has been putting up with this small-minded, racist jerk because of how – ready? – .0006% of the voters who voted for Trump and Hillary cast their votes in 2016.

              Forget all the nonsense about how Trump represents some kind of ‘new wave’ in politics or how so many Americans are pissed off about immigrants coming over the Mexican border and either raping and murdering everyone or taking all our jobs. The numbers don’t lie even if Trump lies all the time.

              Either we go into cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh and get some folks to either mail in their ballots, or stand on lines at polling places, or we don’t. If we don’t, we deserve four more years of Trump.

              To paraphrase Joe, if you can’t send him $25 right now, you’re not reading this blog: https://joebiden.com/. 

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