Tag: politics

I didn’t watch the debate last night. But all you have to do is see the mainstream media calling it a draw to know who won:

Biden brought up the former New York City mayor as he lashed out at Trump for not calling out Russia and other foreign powers for election meddling. In turn, Trump claimed Biden had enriched himself with foreign dollars alongside his son.

‘I don’t make money from China, you do. I don’t make money from Ukraine, you do. I don’t make money from Russia, you do,’ Trump said. The president alluded to Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner to Hunter Biden that Trump brought to the debate as his guest. But it was only a passing mention given the drama Trump’s campaign had orchestrated just hours before the clash on stage.

Prior to the debate, Bobulinski addressed White House reporters and claimed he had proof that the former vice president was aware of his son’s business dealings with China.

‘All of the email, the emails, the horrible emails of the kind of money you were raking in,’ Trump said. ‘And Joe, you were vice president when some of this was happening. And I think you owe an explanation to the American people, why is it – somebody just had a news conference a little while ago – who was essentially supposed to work with you and your family, but what he said was damning,’ Trump continued. ‘And regardless of me I think you have to clean it up and talk to the American people. Maybe you can do it right now,’ the president added….

Trump also found a way to tie Biden’s complaints to his own primary grievance: the Russia probe. After Biden tried to tie the apparent information dumps about his son to Russian election interference, the president scoffed.

‘You mean the laptop is now the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?’ Trump asked, incredulously.

‘The laptop is Russia, Russia, Russia? You got to be kidding. Here we go with Russia,’ he said – taking the issue that most endangered his presidency and brought on the multi-year Mueller probe and turning it on his rival.

Trump found ways to get in many of his favorite digs as the exchange went on and on. He called Hunter’s laptop the ‘laptop from hell.’ He also found ways to put Biden on his heels by asking when he pitched various plans: ‘Why didn’t you do it in the eight years’ serving with Obama. Biden could only summon a brief answer that only hinted at the GOP opposition he once had to contend with in the House. ‘We had a Republican Congress. That’s the answer,’ he said, without expanding. 

Even with the personal animosity and charges of corruption, the debate lacked much of the fire of the first encounter in Cleveland, in part due to the technological change with the microphones, and possibly due to deliberate decisions by the candidates to hold some of their impulses in check. But a comparatively calm debate that some analysts were already calling a draw denied Trump the opportunity to reset the race, with Biden leading him by 8 points in the Real Clear Politics polling average. 

The polls are “tightening”, as they always do, but a little early this election cycle. Most likely this is because the Hunter Biden scandal cut the legs out from pollsters’ intention to “credibly” increasing Joe Biden’s lead to an “insurmountable” lead.

Today’s Trump vs. Biden poll finds that the race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden has suddenly gotten much tighter. IBD/TIPP’s latest 2020 presidential poll update shows that Republicans are rallying around Trump, Biden is leaking Democratic support, and the gap among independents has narrowed.

The latest IBD/TIPP Trump vs. Biden poll update shows the Democratic challenger leading the Republican incumbent by 2.3 points, 48.1{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3}-45.8{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3}, in a four-way presidential poll of likely voters. Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen has the support of 3{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3}, and Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins 0.9{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3}.

Since the IBD/TIPP 2020 Presidential Election Tracking Poll launched on Monday, Oct. 12, Biden’s support has slipped 3.8 points, from 51.9{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3} to a new low-water mark of 48.1{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3}. Trump poll numbers have gone the other way, rising 2.4 points to his new high-water mark of 45.8{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3}. Biden’s lead peaked at 8.6 points in the Oct. 13 presidential poll.

Of course, even this fake poll shows Trump and Biden as deadlocked. Jo Jorgenson is much more likely to receive around one percent of the vote than the 3.27 percent that the Johnson/Weld ticket did in 2016. 

President Trump is overtly flexing on the hapless Biden crime family

Donald Trump said Joe Biden should be jailed and boasted he is leading in early voting during his first of two campaign stops Saturday in Muskegon, Michigan.  

The president said the ‘Biden family is a criminal enterprise’ and called his rival a ‘national security risk’ and ‘corrupt politician’ as he referenced the New York Post story of Hunter Biden’s emails that raised questions about Biden’s Ukraine dealings.  

Trump also went after the state’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer – who was almost kidnapped in a recent plot – sending his raucous crowd into chants calling for the two Democrats to be ‘locked up’

Despite polls showing he is trailing the Democrat, Trump claimed he was out front in early voting and told the sea of MAGA caps he was aiming for 12 years in office.  

Trump then went on to mock the idea of replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and hit out at protesters who have gathered nationwide calling for racial equality, saying that seeing them being ‘pushed about’ by federal agents was ‘beautiful’…. 

He boasted that ‘we’re leading – early voting’ and Democrats needed to be shown a ‘thundering defeat at the ballot box.’ ‘And by the way, it seems to be happening,’ the president said.

He knows he’s going to win. And the media knows that Biden is guilty as Hell. 

Thomas Wictor calls it:

Game over.

@realDonaldTrump will be reelected in a landslide.

For the first time in American history, the Republicans have beaten the Democrats in new-voter registration.

We’re nearing the peak of demoralization season, so we should see the polls start falling back to a more modest Biden lead in the next two weeks to reflect this reality.

I reprehensively neglected to mention the all-important cookie polls in my recent Darkstream on alternative election indicators:

The real winner of the 2020 election might be this Pennsylvania bakery.

A family-owned bakery in the town of Hatboro claims that its election-themed cookies — which are currently flying off the rack — have accurately predicted the outcome of the past three presidential elections.

So far, they say sales indicate a clear leader for the 2020 race, too.

Lochel’s Bakery, located in Montgomery County just north of Philadelphia, had launched its most recent “cookie poll” about six weeks back, offering both “Trump 2020” cookies and “Biden 2020” cookies in red and blue, respectively.

“So far as of 10 a.m. Trump is in the lead 3 to 1,” she told Fox News on Friday morning.

The original cookie poll, in Red Wing, Minnesota, concurs:

Opinions be what they may, but the only acceptable answer here comes piled high with red, white, and blue frosting, and can be found in Red Wing. Each costs $4, and will be counted as a vote for president. Sort of.

Every four years, Hanisch Bakery and Coffee Shop celebrates democracy in the sweetest way possible: by hosting the Presidential Cookie Poll. “It’s a fun election poll that just happens to be pretty darn accurate for some reason,” says Bill Hanisch, the establishment’s chief manager and owner.

In the 1920s, the bakery was called Quandt’s. It’s undergone several ownership and name changes since then, but Hanisch is sure the Braschler family conceived of the cookie poll we recognize today during the Mondale-Reagan election because he worked under them starting when he was 15 years old. Though he’s not certain why the poll first ran back in 1984, the current owner bets it was a simple move to drum up business.

When Hanisch bought the bakery in 2007, he understood he would also become ringmaster for a unique political circus that’s getting more unwieldy each election cycle. So far this year, Trump’s cookies have outsold Biden’s by a mile. 

The cookies have spoken. Trumpslide 2020. 

It seems more than a little strange that the entire media, mainstream and social, is suddenly at Defcon 1 over Hunter Biden. Neon Revolt thinks he knows why:

These two things – they’re connected.

THIS is the thread they’re terrified of coming out. The connection no one has made yet.

We already know the name of a Child Sex Crimes investigator at the FBI was looking into Hunter.

We got Chanel Rion’s post today on twitter about an “underage obsession.”

We know the laptop repair guy went to BOTH the media and the FBI because of what he found on Hunter’s laptop.

Hunter raped a kid.

But no one is asking the obvious question, yet:

WHERE DID THE KID COME FROM??

And just like that, the Q post about Red October and Hunters becoming the hunted begins to make complete sense. 

Incorporating subjective elements as they do, the Keys to the White House are a less-than-perfect election predictor, but they’re certainly less imperfect than the Fake Polls by the Fake News:

Professor Alan Lichtman correctly predicted a Trump victory in 2016 using a model he developed in collaboration with a Soviet scientist who specialized in predicting earthquakes. The model is a true-or-false test on a list of 13 keys about the incumbent administration and the challenger. If five or fewer of the keys are false, the incumbent party wins.

The keys include factors like whether “after the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.” For the 2020 election, this key is false, since Democrats gained seats in the House in November 2018. In 2020, Lichtman is predicting that Biden will win, but the prediction appears to be victim to a subjective judgment on two of the keys.

On key number 11, Lichtman rules that Trump has achieved no “major success in foreign or military affairs.” The assessment does not explain why the eradication of the ISIS caliphate and the withdrawal of troops from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq cannot be counted as major military successes. Lichtman likewise doesn’t explain why he discounted the Trump administration brokering the signing of the Abraham accords, arguably the biggest breakthrough toward peace in the Middle East in decades.

And on key number 12, Lichtman rules that Trump is not “charismatic or a national hero,” an assessment which would be hard to defend before the Republican party, where his approval has steadily held in the mid- to high- 80s.

With the charisma and foreign affairs keys flipped for Trump, the model would swing in favor of the president’s reelection.

As those who watched Darkstream 655 will know, I think Lichtman has coded five keys incorrectly. 

• The economy is not in recession during the electoral campaign. While successive negative GDP quarters indicate a technical recession, Q3 is going to set a record for the fastest annualized growth rate in post-WWII history.
• Prior to the Covid-19 shutdown, the Trump economy recorded higher average growth rates than the previous two terms of the Obama administration. So, again, it’s a question of whether you blindly apply the model or take the current situation into context. No one is blaming Trump for the shutdown or the subsequent consequences, to the contrary, he’s been criticized for trying to keep the economy open.
• The Trump administration has not been tainted by any scandals. Russia-Russia-Russia was an invention of his political opponents. Impeachment was so obviously political and irrelevant that Biden hasn’t even seen fit to mention it in his attack ads. The only scandal is the DC Swamp’s relentless campaign against him.
• Trump has enjoyed historic foreign policy success since Reagan. To claim that he has not had “a major foreign policy or military success” is crazy. He’s also kept the US out of war with China, Russia, Iran, and Syria, despite the best efforts of the neocons.
• Again, to claim Trump is not charismatic is insane. The fact that he might not personally appeal to Alan Lichtman is not the point, because Trump is obviously in the Reagan/Clinton mode of a charismatic leader.

“I’m running as a proud Democrat for the Senate.”

– Joe Biden

Seriously, it’s not a joke or a deep fake. It’s just dementia. The amusing thing is that The Economist is now predicting that the guy who doesn’t even know what office he is running for has a 91 percent of winning the Electoral College and a 99 percent chance of winning the popular vote.

 Andrew Sullivan is dreaming of a Creepy Joe landslide:

I know it’s tempting fate to mention the idea, foolish to entertain it, mad to expect it, but the possibility of a landslide is now real. There are about ten points between the two candidates with three weeks to go, and the momentum is overwhelmingly with the challenger. Among the likeliest scenarios in 538’s poll of polls is now a Biden Electoral College victory of over 400. Texas is in play. The Harris-Pence debate changed nothing, but firmly established Harris’ credentials as a possible president.

And all this changes a huge amount. A Biden win would be a reprieve for the country; a Biden landslide would be an American miracle. 

Unlike anything else, it would cauterize the wound of Trump, preventing further infection. It would say to posterity: we made this hideous mistake, for understandable reasons, but after four years, we saw what we did and decisively changed course. It would turn the Trump era of nihilism, tribalism and cruelty into a cautionary tale of extremism, illiberalism and, above all, failure. It would suggest, especially if older whites come round some more, that the future need not be one of spiraling racial polarization, but of multiracial support for liberal democracy, its norms, and practices. What you learn from studying the decline and collapse of republics is that illiberal precedents become the new baseline if they are not instantly repudiated and punished. A landslide loss for Trump would mitigate, if not remove, the deep damage he has done. 

It’s really astonishing to observe the lengths that people will go to deny reality. And I’m not talking about the election results: who can be expected to accurately predict anything on the basis of the folded, spindled, and mutilated polls? I’m talking about the idea that the spiraling racial polarization is the result of Trump’s presidency or the failure of older whites to support liberal democracy.

It is, to the contrary, the inevitable result of the 1965 Immigration Act and subsequent demographic dilution of the American nation. Since Sullivan is an immigrant himself, though, he is psychologically unable to even entertain the possibility that what made his preferred life possible is the cause of the problem he decries.

But Sullivan isn’t the only one. 538 currently assesses the chances of a Biden landslide at 36 percent, with an 86 percent chance of winning the electoral vote. Of course, at this time in 2016, 538 assessed Hillary Clinton’s chance of winning the Electoral College at 86.9 percent.

In the post-ideological age, a nominal affiliation with ideas does not serve as an accurate indication of genuine loyalties. Republican elder Bob Dole reveals that the debate commission is 100 percent anti-Trump despite half of them being Republicans:

The Commission on Presidential Debates is supposedly bipartisan w/ an equal number of Rs and Ds. I know all of the Republicans and most are friends of mine.  I am concerned that none of them support @realDonaldTrump. A biased Debate Commission is unfair.

You are living in a post-ideological age. Understand this. Accept this. It is time to stop thinking in terms of Left and Right, of Liberal and Conservative, of Democrat and Republican, and think in terms of identity instead.

“In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” 

—Lee Kuan Yew