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Why Does Trump Refuse To Accept The Results?

December 1, 2020

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Know what’s going to happen in exactly two weeks? The Electoral College will cast 306 votes for Joe Biden to become the 46th President of the United States. And the day this happens, the entire alt-right media assemblage, largely created and promoted by Donald Trump, is already beginning to fade away.

Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to listen to Rush every day and websites like Infowars will still be around. Even a few Proud Boys will show up at various outdoor events, maybe even still toting their AR’s. But the petals will have fallen off the roses, so to speak.

All of which creates a serious cash-flow problem for the Trump organization because the only products which bear his name that he actually owns are those MAGA hats, shirts, and flags that he peddles at his rallies and sells online. If some events do take place, they won’t draw the thousands who showed up at his campaign events over the last five years.

Trump doesn’t actually own the real estate properties that bear his name. The buildings are owned by groups of private investors, many of whom live overseas. Ditto the golf courses which he visits most weekends, as well as the hotels.

On the other hand, if you buy a MAGA hat, or a MAGA shirt, or a MAGA flag, the money you pay goes right into Trump’s pocket because he owns the brand and he owns the name. He also owns the company which imports all that crap from factories in China, the same China run by those ‘thugs’ who gave us Covid-19.

Why do you think those hapless lawyers led by Rudy Giuliani continue to push their totally unfounded legal claims? Why do you think that Trump continues to spread the nonsense about how he’s going to run again in 2024? Why do you think he has told the lapdog, liberal media that on the day Joe’s sworn in that he’ll hold a competitive event?

What else is he going to do with all those MAGA caps he still owns? How else can he otherwise pay off the investors who put up the dough to build the now-bankrupt Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C?

Guess who showed up at a ‘stop the steal’ rally in Georgia? None other than Alex Jones. He’s the guy who basically created the entire conspiracy-theory narrative for the alt-right and pushes all kinds of retail crap on his Infowars website.

What was the first, great conspiracy theory that Jones put out there to promote the alt-right? That Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Who invented this nonsense for him to peddle? A guy named Donald Trump.

I notice that Republicans are beginning to get nervous about whether the two Senate seats in Georgia will swing blue because Trump continues to bark about how the election is ‘rigged.’ Even one of Trump’s most loyal and sycophantic supporters, Geraldo Rivera, is now begging his good buddy Trump to shut the f*** up. I don’t notice Geraldo committing to buy up all those unsold MAGA hats.

Readers of this column may want to believe that it was written tongue-in-cheek. Not true. Not true at all. Trump went into the election saying that the exercise would be a great way to promote his brand. The only problem is that as his political fortunes have collapsed, so has the value of his name.

So, what does every company selling consumer products do when the inventory starts piling up on the shelves? You cut the price and shove as much of the unsold crap out there in order to pay your bills.

And that’s what all this noise about a ‘rigged’ election is really all about. It’s Trump’s last attempt to maintain the cash flow that supports a lifestyle which the taxpayers will stop supporting the day that Joe takes the oath.

For the 26th out of 27 days since the election, Trump doesn’t have a single, public event. He’s left the White house to play golf – that’s it. What’s he doing the rest of the time? Probably haranguing Alex Jones to sell some more MAGA hats.

Want To Fix An Election? Trump Will Show You How.

November 28, 2020

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              If I were to write a book about the Donald Trump presidency, it would begin and end with the opinion published yesterday by the 3rd Circuit, which rejected yet another attempt by Trump’s legal team to reverse the vote in Pennsylvania – an opinion that you can download here. The opinion was written by a judge who not only was appointed to the 3rd Circuit by none other than Donald Trump, but happens to be an active member of the Federalist Society, a “group of conservatives and libertarians dedicated to reforming the current legal order.”

            Here is how the opinion begins: “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

              Trump has been bleating about ‘massive voter fraud’ ever since his attacks on Joe as a ‘far-left radical’ didn’t make a dent in the polls and also didn’t deflect away from the miserable job he has done responding to Covid-19. However, there was only one, little problem on November 4th.

Not only did Joe win the popular vote by 52% of all votes cast, but he also racked up sizable pluralities in the must-win battleground states. He won Michigan by 150,000 votes, the margin in Nevada was more than 30,000 votes, in Pennsylvania Joe garnered 85,000 more votes than Trump.  Joe carried these three states by more than 265,000 votes. In 2016, Trump flipped these three states with a margin of slightly less than 90,000 votes.

              When ‘killer’ Rudy Giuliani stood across the street from the Fantasy Island porn shop and made his first public statement about the Pennsylvania vote, he must have mentioned the word ‘fraud’ at least four times. Twice during that bizarre performance, he stressed that what happened in Pennsylvania was ‘massive fraud.’ The phrase ‘massive fraud’ is now used by members of the Trump noise brigade (e.g., Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity) to the point that you can’t mention one word without mentioning the other.

But when Giuliani pleaded his case before the 3rd Circuit, he didn’t talk about ‘fraud’ at all. Instead, he said that some counties didn’t let Republican poll watchers get right next to the ballot counters, and also allowed voters to fix technical defects in their votes. Rudy’s been going around waving a pile of papers which he says are ‘hundreds’ of affidavits supporting these claims, but somehow no evidence of any kind was presented to the Court before, during or after his appeal.

Incidentally, the same day the 3rd Circuit told Trump and his ‘legal strike force’ to get lost, the state of Wisconsin finished its recount and found that Joe, not Trump, deserved a few more votes. This little exercise in post-election nothingness only cost the Trump campaign $3 million, money which perhaps they got from a donor in Texas who is now suing the campaign to have his donation returned in full.

On the one hand, I really wish that Trump would do what every, other loser in a Presidential election has done (with the exception of Hillary Clinton), which is to simply shut the f##k up and go away. On the other hand, he is providing us with a remarkable degree of entertainment during the holiday season, a time when newsworthy content tends to be slight.

When Trump first began ranting about a ‘rigged’ election, I thought that maybe it was a strategy designed to cover up his attempt to steal some votes. Given the closeness of the 2016 election and the miserable job he has done in the following four years, how could he imagine that he might win an honest election the second time around?

Why wouldn’t Trump sit down with Roger Stone and try to figure out how to steal the Presidential vote? After all, Dick Nixon might have fixed the 1972 election if the Watergate burglars had remembered to remove a piece of tape from the office door.

What Do The Polls Show? Part II.

November 2, 2020

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              Recall that I said yesterday to use only the most recent polls in predicting what will happen on Election Day. So here goes.

              The most recent national polls covering more than 16,000 registered and likely voters have Joe up by 10 to 12 points. These polls were taken between October 19 and November 1. More important, these polls all set the dog-shit vote at 4%. If these polls are correct, Joe will wind up with a wider margin for the popular vote since Bush beat Dukakis in 1998.

              As for the electoral votes and the battleground states, the most recent polls have it like this:

              The poll results from the battleground states is entirely consistent with what we have seen since we first started doing this weekly report back on August 17th. Joe had a 4.5% overall lead against Trump, Joe now leads Trump 50.13% to 46.3%. I added Minnesota to the list after Trump held a rally there a month ago, and if we pull Minnesota out of the current numbers, the gap between the two camps stays just about the same.

              Two other points to note. In August, Trump had slight leads in three states: Iowa, Georgia, and Texas. Now he has slight leads in Ohio, Iowa, and Texas. The other 10 battleground states give Joe margins between 1% and 12%.

              Here’s the most important number of all. Joe is at or above 50% in 6 battleground states; Trump hasn’t hit the 50% mark in any battleground state. Back on August 17, the overall dog-shit vote was 6.77%. It’s now down to 3.56%. If Trump were to pull out every, single undecided vote in evert, single battleground state, Joe would still grab 77 electoral votes. How many does he need? He needs 62 electoral votes.

              No wonder Trump and his gang are trying to suppress the vote. Yesterday our good friend Steve Klitzman sent around an op-ed written by an attorney, Ben Ginsburg, who co-chaired the Bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration in 2013. Ginsburg spent nearly 40 years working for various GOP campaigns, and now believes that Trump is taking the GOP back to the ‘bad old days’ when they signed a consent decree to stop intimidating voters in 1981.

              There’s only one little problem with Ginsburg’s lament about how ‘his party,’ the GOP, is going back to its old-time, ‘voter suppression’ ways. The issue then and now isn’t about votes. It’s about race. The GOP has been playing the race card at lest since 1964 when Barry Goldwater ran a national campaign based on ‘state’s rights.’

              Richard Nixon redrew the national electoral map in 1968 by promising Southern segregationists that he would ‘go slow’ on civil rights. Ronald Reagan held his first 1980 campaign rally in a Mississippi town where three kids who had been registering Blacks were abducted, shot, and dumped in a ditch. George H. W. Bush won in 1988 with a TV ad that featured a Black felon who was given a furlough by Mike Dukakis, then went out and committed armed robbery and rape.

              When Trump began using the term ‘silent majority,’ I knew we were going into yet another national election that would turn on the issue of race. Because those words are nothing but code words for telling Whites that it’s okay to feel superior to Blacks as long as you keep your feelings to yourself but express them when you go to vote.

              And if anyone who reads this column wants to deny the reality of what I just said, then I suggest you contact Attorney Ginsburg and tell him that you are also concerned about efforts to ‘suppress’ the vote.

              Just remember what I said the other day. Trump’s not a racist. Trump is Klan.

What Do The Polls Show? Part I.

November 1, 2020

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Good morning everyone and welcome to the darkest month. Hopefully, today’s column will be one of the three last columns I write on the 2020 campaign. Tomorrow’s column will analyze the final poll numbers and Tuesday’s column will explain the campaign results. Unless, of course, Trump wins another four years. Anyway, back to today’s column.

What I want to do is explain the electoral map in a very clear and concise way. In the process, I’m also going to explain why the 2016 pre-election polls were both right and wrong, and give you some guidance as to what to look for over the next couple of days.

To begin, let’s briefly review the electoral map from 2016. Trump won the election with 304 EV’s, Clinton had 227 EV’s. The magic number, of course, is 270 EV’s. The narrative which allegedly explains Trump’s 2016 victory focuses almost exclusively on how and why the pre-election polls missed Trump’s late surge in 6 states that flipped from blue to red: Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Together, these states gave him 99 EV’s.

But for all the talk about the new MAGA movement and how it will propel Trump to victory again, along with the 99 EV’s from states that flipped, Trump also picked up 52 EV’s in red states which he won with either less or barely more than 50% of the votes. In other words, Trump went into this year’s campaign with only 153 safe electoral votes.

Ready?  Watch this. Joe and Kammie went into this year’s campaign with 176 absolutely safe EV’s; i.e., jurisdictions which gave Hillary at least 55% of the vote in 2016. They also had 8 other states, plus Maine-CD1, which gave the blue team another 57 EV’s in 2016 even though none of these jurisdictions surpassed 50% of the total vote.

So going into the 2020 campaign, there were 209 EV’s up for grabs, meaning jurisdictions which voted red or blue by just 50% or less. And by the way, for all the talk about Texas flipping from red to blue, Trump picked up 36 EV’s from Texas in 2016, but only received 52% of the statewide vote. The MAGA movement in even the Lone Star State wasn’t such a big deal.

If Trump is re-elected on Tuesday, his winning margin may turn out to be even thinner than the winning numbers he racked up in 2016. On the other hand, if Joe can move Hillary’s numbers in the battleground states up by 3 percent, the result could be a landslide for the blue team.

Back in early October I referred to Trump as the ‘accidental President’ because when I first began looking at the results of the 2016 election, it was clear that he didn’t so much win as the blue team lost.

So the question on Tuesday will come down to this: Is Trump not only an accidental President but an emperor without clothes?

Want To Bet On Who’s Going To Win?

October 29, 2020

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              Our good friend John Lott just sent us a link to the latest betting odds on next week’s outcome, which has Joe out front by two-to-one odds over Trump.  This prediction isn’t as strong in Joe’s favor as what Nate Silver is saying today, but betting odds aren’t predictive like poll results because people make bets for all kinds of reasons and in many instances bet differently than the way they will vote.

              There’s something else about how odds change on websites where you can bet the outcome of an election or bet on just about anything else. As money flows one way or the other, the odds change. So it’s not like watching a website based on polls where you only can judge the validity of the polls after the vote actually occurs. I can make bets on how much a candidate’s poll numbers change whether the candidate wins or not.

              The problem with betting services that take bets on the outcome of political campaigns is that the money comes from bettors who may or may not really follow the political campaigns. Many people consider themselves to be ‘informed’ bettors – they study things carefully; they check out the stories and the rumors swirling around. After all, they’re not just shooting their mouths off, they’re putting their bucks on the line as well.

              On the other hand, there are plenty of people who make bets without a shred of objective knowledge guiding the decision for how or why they make a particular bet. My grandfather put a dime down on ‘da numbah’ every day and God knows how or why he told Tiny the Bookie to ‘play 365’ instead of ‘366.’

              That being said, right now the interactive map based on betting odds has Joe with 290 electoral votes. Meanwhile, the interactive map at 270towin has Joe with 267 electoral votes with Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Texas as toss-ups. But if all 4 EV’s in Maine go for Joe, ditto 2 Nebraska EV’s, then Trump is toast.  Now there’s a good chance that Nebraska might see one EV go to Joe, but there’s also a chance that Maine will split its 4 electoral votes between Joe and Trump. In which case, one of the other swing states has to move from red to blue.

              All of these meanderings, of course, are based on the assumption that we shouldn’t trust any of the polls because of what happened in 2016. But I’m not sure that we need to worry about what happened in 2016, if only because I can’t imagine that Joe and Kam put together a strategy for this year’s race without taking the 2016 debacle into account.

              One major change in this year’s contest is that the wall Trump built in the rust belt is now about as finished as the wall he’s been building to keep all those Mexican ‘rapists’ out. Joe has a 9-point lead in Michigan and a larger lead in Wisconsin. Pull those two states out of the Trump W column, and Joe only needs to beat Trump in one of the other states that Trump flipped in 2016.

              When was the last time that a candidate won the Presidential election with less than 310 electoral votes and a minority of the popular vote? Since the country was comprised of 48 states it has never happened . Not once!

              I thought that Trump ran a brilliant campaign in 2016. He knew exactly where he had to go and what to say to grab the brass ring.  I didn’t like what he said but I was impressed by how he planned and managed the campaign.

              On the other hand, the day after he was inaugurated and began lying about the size of the previous day’s crowd, I started to think that a brain which had functioned so well during the election had now been replaced by a brain that barely functioned at all.

              How could Trump have been so stupid to think he was now heading a new and growing ‘movement’ to make America great again? Just as well, because I’ll jump to one of those betting websites and take the long odds.

Where Are All Those ‘New’ Trump Voters? Nowhere.

October 15, 2020

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              Last night I was watching the Hannity show on Fox because I enjoy how the most belligerent pro-Trump noisemakers are trying to explain away the fact that their candidate keeps dropping in the polls. Two weeks ago, the story was that Trump would do the same thing to Joe that he did to Hillary; namely, push himself into the lead during the last 30 days of the campaign. 

              So now we’re right in the middle of those last 30 days and guess what? The Trump campaign isn’t moving forward at all. Remember how everyone was saying that the race would tighten up?  Joe’s national poll number was 50.3% versus 43.2% for what’s-his-name on September 1st, this morning Joe’s at 52.4% and the other guy is at 42%, the gap has gone from 7 to 10.4 points. Some tightening up.

              So Hannity gets two other alt-right schmucks to appear, one guy a noisemaker down in Florida, the other some AM big-mouth out of who knows where. And what’s the new lie to go along with what Giuliani said yesterday that the virus isn’t killing anyone at all?  He really said that. He really did.

              Here’s what they have come up with. Ready? Trump won in 2016 because all kinds of people who had never voted before came out and voted for him. Which is why the polls were all wrong because pollsters didn’t know how to contact all these new, first-time Trump voters.

              Why will Trump win again even if the polls continue to go south? Hannity claims there’s still lots of new voters out there who will show up again. And how can you deny this when there’s so much enthusiasm at those rallies this week? Even the President himself, according to Hannity, can’t get over the energy and excitement of those crowds.

              So here’s what I did last night.  I looked at the state-by-state vote totals for 2012 and 2016. Obviously, if Trump won because he got so many new voters to show up, it must be reflected in the vote totals for each state. Okay – here goes.

              Trump won 30 states in 2016, including 6 states that went for Obama in 2012. Together, the total Trump votes in all those states was 40,35,550. If you add together the votes received in those states by Romney and Trump, Trump got 51% in 2016, Romney got 49% in 2012. Wow – that’s a lot of new voters, right?

              In 6 of the 30 states won by Trump, his vote total was less in 2016 than what Romney polled in 2012. In 8 other states, Trump beat Romney’s number by 1 percent or less. In other words, in almost half the states that Trump won, there was no appearance of ‘new’ voters at all.

              The only 2 states where Trump’s total vote represented an increase of more than 3 percent over what Romney pulled four years earlier were North Dakota and West Virginia, which together provided Trump with a whole, big 1.7% of the total votes he received in his 30 winning states. Let’s hear it for all the new voters in West Virginia! Yaaaaaayyy.

              For almost four years we have been assaulted with a steady barrage of absolute bullshit about how Trump’s election marked the beginning of a new populist movement, how he has brought a whole, new voting population onto the playing field, how he has created a new majority of voters who never had anyone listening to them before he came along.

              I’ll go back to what my father used to say – figures don’t lie but liars sure can figure. And this bunch has been lying again and again for the last four years.

              But please don’t let these numbers make you complacent. Please do whatever you can do – phone calls, street-corners, knocking on doors, sending Joe and Kammie a little more cash. Because it’s not only winning that’s important. It has to be a BIG WIN!

Could November 3rd Be A Landslide?

October 7, 2020

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Last night I told my sister that the way things looked right now, Joe was on his way to winning 350 electoral votes (EV) or more. 

She said, “That’s impossible.”

I answered, “It’s not only possible, it could really happen and tomorrow I’ll explain how and why.  So here’s my explanation.

Joe started the campaign with 19 Commie/Antifa/sanctuary states in his pocket which together represent 222 votes. This group includes big-ticket states like California, New York, Illinois, Virginia, and New Jersey, five states which alone hold 131 EV’s. Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and  Washington add another 43 EV’s, Add Colorado, Connecticut and Oregon and you have 23 more. The rest are the little guys like New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, Delaware, and DC, okay?

As of this morning, the average gap between Joe and what’s-his-name is 25 percent; i.e., overall Joe’s got 60% of the voters who say they are likely to vote, what’s-his-name has 35%. A few states, like Virginia and New Mexico only show Joe leading by 10-12%, but those states are the exception, not the rule.

Then we have what are referred to as the ‘battleground’ states, which are states that, generally speaking, go blue, but in 2016 went red. There are another 9 such states, together representing 125 EV’s. Florida’s the big one with 29 EV’s, followed by Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), and Wisconsin (10), what we’ll call the rust-belt states. New Mexico, Nevada, and Iowa complete the battleground group.

To get to 350 EV’s, Joe has to capture all 9 battleground states, an outcome which appeared not only doubtful but entirely fanciful two weeks ago. In 4 of those states (MI, NM, WI, PA) Joe has hit the magic number of 50%. The average gap for all 9 states is slightly higher than 5% – 49.56% to 44.51%. And the Sedaris dog-shit number in all 9 states has slipped down under 6%.

Yesterday, the tattered remnants of Trump’s shock-jock noise machine went on a tear about the latest ‘fake news’ national polls, which show Joe moving ahead by as much as 16%. These numbers have to be faked because, after all, Trump is still ahead in 23 states.

My father, who was trained as an accountant, used to say, “Figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure.” And what’s-his-name’s campaign narrative in this regard proves my father to have been absolutely correct.

The total population in the 23 states that still have what’s-his-name ahead is currently 111 million; in the 19 states going for Joe, the population amounts to 136 million. Add to that latter figure the total population in the battleground states (another 80 million) and right now the states that are showing Joe in front, constitute 68% of the country’s population as a whole.

Assuming that the national polls try to build a response based on a ‘representative’ sample of voters, how could the national polls show anything other than a double-digit lead for Joe, given his campaign’s current performance in both the blue and battleground states?

Of course, there’s always a chance that lots of voters for what’s-his-name are following some secret plan to hide their true intentions for how they intend to vote. That’s all well and good, except the polling outfit making this claim – Rasmussen – admits that even when they adjust their numbers to take the ‘silent vote’ into account, what’s-his-name continues to lag behind.

Last night I was watching the NBC National News at 6:30 on the network’s affiliate station, WWLP. Midway through the broadcast was a 30-second campaign ad for Trump. Massachusetts is the only state of all 50 states that sends a completely Democratic delegation to DC.  As of this morning, Joe leads what’s-his-name by 65% to 29%. Even in the two biggest Commie states, California and New York, what’s-his-name is above 30%.

Buying TV time in Massachusetts? No wonder Trump’s campaign is broke. No wonder that Joe could just wind up blowing Trump out.

And just remember that every vote counts, if only to prevent what’s-his-name from challenging the results.

Where’s The Trump Base?

September 15, 2020

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              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.

What Will We Write About If Biden Wins?

July 29, 2020

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              The latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly contains an article which makes the case that Trump could still pull things out in November because he has key advantages that our side doesn’t have. The problem with this article, however, is that it’s based on a mish-mash of quotes from various sources, all of whom will find themselves without anyone to talk to if Biden actually wins. Let’s look at each argument in turn.

              Argument #1. Trump will spin a slight recovery into the beginning of a real economic return. To buttress this point, the author of The Atlantic piece, Peter Nicholas, says that a new ABC-WaPo survey still gives Trump a 50 percent mark for how he’s handled the economy. Except the mark is actually 47%, Trump is tied with Joe in the new poll and his positive number has dropped by 19 points since March.

              Argument #2. The polls are no more correct than they were in 2016.  Which experts does Nicholas quote for this idea? None other than KellyAnne Conway, who deserves the Lifetime Medal of Freedom for how much bullshit she has pitched for Trump over the past four years.

              Argument #3. Trump can use the powers of incumbency to campaign all the time. Nicholas uses as an example of Trump’s media presence his daily briefing on Covid-19. Except there’s only one little problem. Trump has now twice abandoned those briefing because he looks and sounds like a fool.

              Argument #4. Biden still can’t convince the Bernie supporters to get onboard. This argument is bolstered by a comment from big-mouth Nina Turner, a co-chair of the Sanders campaign, who believes that voting for Biden is like eating a “bowl of shit.” The pro-Trump media has had a field-day with that one.

              Argument #5. Biden’s vote might be suppressed because Trump is against the mail-in vote and in-person voting sites are being reduced as a protection from Covid-19. Why do we assume that making people wait longer to vote will only hurt Biden? Why couldn’t the same lack of voting sites hurt Trump?

              Argument #6. Trump could always pull an October surprise. Trump can pretend that a vaccine is ready to hit the market, but how does such news mitigate the fact that because of how Trump responded to the ‘Chinese plague’ back in February, we need to rush a vaccine into production at all? And what about the possibility that an October surprise would be pulled off by Biden against Trump?

              Trump may want to believe that he’s a ‘wartime’ President but Americans aren’t lining up to support him the way they supported George Bush after the Twin Towers came down. Why not? Because Trump isn’t a wartime President. He’s a real-estate salesman who figured out how to use social media against an opponent who ran a totally inept and mismanaged campaign.

              When Obama was President, every time I walked into a bookshop there was always a big display of anti-Obama books. He was undermining the Constitution, he was promoting nefarious social policies, he was born outside the United States, he was doing this or doing that.  Now I go into bookstores and that same display case is filled with anti-Trump books. He’s a Fascist, a crook, a liar, next month Michael Cohen’s tell-all will be on display.

              So here’s the question: What are all these writers going to do if Biden wins? Can you imagine an anti-Biden book which argues that he’s a threat to this or a threat to that? If things keep going the way they are going in this campaign, nobody’s going to buy a book which tries to prove that Biden’s anything other than what he really is – a nice guy who might have beaten Trump in 2016 except he didn’t run because of the untimely death of his older son.

              Yesterday the President of the United States got up in public and promoted the medical views of a doctor who actually believes that DNA from outer-space aliens is being used to treat patients here on Earth. And Biden’s the demented candidate this year?

Trump’s Numbers Are Going From Bad To Worse.

July 27, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , Leave a comment

Back in 1937 they held a special election in the 10th Congressional District of Texas which at that time covered Austin and much of the hill country that covers the South-Central part of the state. The Hill Country includes Gillespie County, and smack dab in the middle of the county is a town called Stonewall, which right now has around 500 residents, which has always been more or less the population of that place.

              One of the families that lived in Stonewall was the Johnson family. They had a boy named Lyndon who was a high school teacher, then borrowed some money from his wife’s family and got himself into the 10th CD race. The seat was open because the long-time Congressman, ‘Bucky’ Buchannon, had dropped dead in February. In those days, the only way that a Texas Congressman lost his seat in the House of Representatives was if he dropped dead.

              So here was ol’ Lyndon trying for the first time to get himself out of the dust of the Hill Country and make a name for hisself. There was only one problem. A week before the election, ‘ol Lyndon got together behind the Presbyterian Church with his buddies who were helping him out. And one of the assembled group had no choice but to deliver the bad news.

              “Lyndon,” he said to ol’ Lyndon, “you losin’ an’ you losin’ bad. If we don’ figure out sumpin’ that will get you ahead of that feller who’s beatin’ you, y’all goin’ t’be back teachin’ school agin.”

              There was silence. Nobody knew what to do. That is until ol’ Lyndon raised his head, smiled and said, “I got it! We’ll spread the rumor that he f**ks pigs!”

              “Awww Lyndon,” said one of his friends, “you know he don’t do that.”

              “Yea.” replied Lyndon, smiling and nodding his head up and down, “but we’ll get him to deny it.”

              As promised, here are the weekly stats on how Biden and Trump match up in the crucial swing states. And if the numbers continue to change the way they have changed in the last week, the only thing that Trump can do to reverse his disappearing campaign is to spread some kind of ‘he f**ks pigs’ around about ol’ Joe.

              What the Hell, it worked for ol’ Lyndon back in ’37 (that story was often retold by LBJ himself) so maybe it’ll work again. They’ve tried just about everything else, including that Joe’s demented, that he made corrupt deals for his son Hunter in China and the Ukraine. Why not spread the rumor that he f**ks pigs?

              That being said, here are the swing-state numbers as of today:

Note that Joe is now at or almost at the magic 50-mark in three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. Last week he hadn’t yet hit any state at the 50-point mark. Note that Trump is slightly ahead in Iowa and they are basically tied in Texas. Last week, Trump was ahead in Georgia, Iowa and Arkansas. Note that Joe has pulled slightly ahead in Ohio. In other words, Joe has improved his numbers in just about every swing state and he’s ahead in 9 out of 12 swing states. Last week he was ahead in 6 out of 12 swing states.

But here’s the more important news. There is not one single swing state which still has a dog-shit (undecided) number above 9, and in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona, the dog-shit number is down to 6. If the dog-shit vote were to split evenly and nothing else were to change, joe would wind up with 135 additional electoral votes, which would give him 332 EV’s on election day.

Today Trump goes to Dallas for a meeting with some Black church and community leaders to talk about improving relations between the cops and the local folks. The discussion is being called (by the White House) “Transition to Greatness: Restoring, Rebuilding and Renewing.” Neither the DA, the sheriff or the police chief are planning to attend.

Hey, wait a minute. I thought we already were great. I thought that all we needed to do now was keep ourselves great. Frankly, I think Trump stands a better chance of reversing his political collapse if he spends less time talking about being great or becoming great and concentrates instead on whether or not Joe f**ks pigs.

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