Maybe it’s me. Maybe I really am beginning to lose it mentally. Maybe I don’t understand what I read or what I’m told.
I’m referring to the story on one of the news aggregators today about the latest Presidential poll done by YouGov and Yahoo where the headline reads: “Trump Vs. DeSantis: New Poll Points to Runaway Winner in Republican Primary,” and the winner is Donald Trump.
So, I go to the details of the poll and Trump is running away with 45% of the votes. DeSantis, Haley, Youngkin and five others divvy up another 40%, and 15% of the respondents haven’t yet figured it out.
That’s a runaway? Trump doesn’t even score 50% and the headline reads as if the primaries are over and done.
Meanwhile, the same survey asked respondents if they wanted Joe to run again in 2024, and 47% said ‘yes.’ For all the media chatter about how everyone hates Joe and thinks he’ doing a lousy job, in fact right now his numbers are better than the numbers for Trump.
And I noticed one other interesting thing about the alleged lack of support for Joe. In fact, when the poll breaks out his popularity among age groups, Joe gets positives from 61% of the 18-29 group and 52% from respondents between the ages of 30 and 44. He dips down to 41% for the 45 – 64 group and 39% positive for the old farts (65 and up.)
But lemme tell you something about the so-called senior group. They never like anyone. They sit around all morning at McDonald’s, drinking a cup of coffee which they get for 49 cents (plus free refills) and bitch about everything.
The problem is that they all vote. Of the four age groups mentioned above, the over-65 bunch are the only group where the actual voters represent more than 70% of those who could vote (the rate is 71%.) The 18-29 group voting percentage is 45%, the 30-44 group is 59% and the 45-64 is 67%.
So, as the average voting age goes up, the percentage who actually participate in the so-called democratic system goes down. And this age-based behavior isn’t just true for Joe; it’s equally true for Trump, with his percentage with the 40-44 group at 60%, but dropping down to under 40% for the two older groups.
One other point about Trump being such a ‘runaway’ winner in the poll. Trump gets 45% when he’s one of nine GOP candidates in the race. But when the poll asked voters to just choose between Trump and DeSantis, Trump is at 47% and DeSantis is at 39%. That’s no runaway at all. Get rid of nobodies like Youngkin, Chris Christie, Mike Pompeo, and Liz Cheney, and almost all those votes go to DeSantis, not to Trump.
So, what this poll really shows us is that on the GOP side, it’s a two-man race, and one of those two men isn’t even a declared candidate.
I’m not all that happy with the poll results because in both the Trump-Joe and the DeSantis-Joe matchups, Joe is slightly behind. Which doesn’t make me feel worried so much about Joe, as it leaves me concerned that DeSantis might actually wind up beating out Trump.
Granted, since DeSantis still hasn’t declared, the media isn’t yet targeting him the way they will ramp up the negatives once he’s officially in the race. But there’s simply no way that Trump could win another national election in 2024 because he really has become that piece of old fish sitting in the fridge and beginning to stink the place out.
The fact that both DeSantis and Pence didn’t bother to appear at CPAC tells you that the vaunted Trump ‘base’ is every day beginning to wear thin. And neither DeSantis nor Pence has to worry about running a national campaign from a holding cell in a federal courthouse or maybe from the exercise track where the inmates at Butner walk every day.
Who showed up at CPAC and made the most noise for Trump? Steve Bannon, whose Mexican Wall scam was pardoned by Trump, but in November he goes on trial in New York State for the same thing. And Bannon may have to go into court with a Legal Aid attorney, since he owes his current law firm almost five hundred thousand bucks.
I’ll say this about the GOP. At least that bunch gives me something to write about every day.