If it weren’t for the daily attempt by Fake News to keep the 2024 election alive so that some of their advertisers will continue to run their ads, the contest is already buried and dead. How else do you explain the fact that Trump has opened a 30-point lead in the polls over his nearest competitor which will set him up to become the first nominee of a major political party to lose the popular Presidential vote three times?
That’s right. For all the talk about Joe’s lack of stamina, Joe’s dementia, Joe’s lousy poll numbers among registered Democrats, blah, blah, blah, and blah, when the chips are down next year the Democrats will come together as they always come together and hand Joe another win.
The truth is that the GOP has never felt all that comfortable with the idea of a government whose leadership is chosen through a popular vote. Have you ever been invited to a GOP-sponsored voter registration event?
Trump had no choice but to make a big deal out of the primary campaign in 2016 because he wasn’t known except by people who watched reality-TV and most of the GOP leadership didn’t feel comfortable with him anyway. I love, for example, how Billy Kristol is still trying to short-circuit Trump. Wasn’t it Kristol who gave us Sarah Palin in 2008?
On the other hand, I’m beginning to think that it really doesn’t matter who sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute desk. This country is so large, so diverse, so militarily powerful, and so goddamn wealthy, that I don’t think the decisions made at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue mean very much at all.
Take, for example, how Trump responded to Covid-19. He didn’t respond at all except to launch this phony pay-as-you-go deal where the U.S. Treasury would allegedly pay for the development of an anti-viral drug. In fact, the Pfizer vaccine, which I have now taken three times, was developed without any financial support from the government at all.
As for military threats from abroad, this past weekend I went to an air show to take a look at the new fighter plane, the McDonnell-Douglas F-35. This plane can do everything – strafe, bomb, intercept – and we’re not shipping this amazing weapons package to any of our friends.
What’s the GOP’s newest plan to make America great again? They want to cut back food stamps and other so-called ‘welfare’ programs by raising the age for mandatory working age for welfare recipients from 49 to 55.
The GOP has been opposed to government welfare programs since they were first introduced by FDR in the New Deal beginning in 1933. Among other programs, these laws established a national minimum wage, hired private companies to build and repair bridges and roads, provided insurance to protect the money which people saved in banks, and established the Soil Bank program to help farm states deal with farm debt.
Real radical, right? Shades of Marxism, Communism and Soros-ism, right? The GOP was opposed to all those programs then, and they’re still opposed to them now.
I have a friend, a nice guy, who has always voted GOP because, as he says, the Democrats will ‘give everything away.’ Of course, this friend believes that ‘giving it away’ only helps minorities, not hard-working, honest folks like him and me.
Meanwhile, when I once happened to mention to him that he only owned his home because the government insured his mortgage through the FDIC, he stared at me in total disbelief. It’s not that he disagreed with me. He just had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
For those of us who wake up every morning and can’t wait to read or watch the political news, it’s difficult for us to appreciate that for most people, politics is the last thing on their minds. If they bother to vote, less than 10% of voters change their party choice from time to time.
I have voted in every election since 1968. Counting the midterms, I have voted 28 times. I have never voted for any candidate who isn’t on the Democrat(ic) line. I’m not bragging. It’s just the way I am. And it happens to be the way most people behave, politically speaking, that is.
In the 2016 Presidential election, she won the popular vote, but her national total was slightly under what Obama racked up in 2012. The number of votes Hillary got in the 3 blue states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – which swung red in 2016 – ready? – was 600,00 total votes fewer than what Barack pulled from those states in 2012.
The basic rule in political campaigns says that your party begins every campaign on the assumption that they already have all the votes they received the last time around, and that the current campaign is all about finding new votes. The fact that Joe took back those three critical states in 2020 by first making up those 600,000 ‘lost’ votes tells you the weakness of the Trump brand in political terms.
Everyone is pissed off at CNN for giving Trump free advertising in last week’s Town Hall. But what I found interesting is that Trump behaved exactly the same way he has been behaving since he announced his first Presidential campaign in 2015.
Which is the reason I believe the 2024 election is already in the books, notwithstanding the daily efforts by Fake News to keep it alive.