Like everyone else who is obsessed with current-day politics, particularly during a Presidential campaign, I pay attention to the polls, if only because just looking at numbers is much less offensive than listening to what some other expert has to say.
I look at lots of polls, but the one I trust more than any other is Quinnipiac, first of all because they are right much more frequently than they are wrong, and second of all because the polls are generated by a not-for-profit organization (Quinnipiac University) and therefore don’t need to worry about how many daily clicks they receive.
And the one thing I never do is read what some pundit or digital noisemaker says about a poll without reading the actual results and raw data of the poll itself. That’s an absolute no-no, at least in my book.
In that regard, the latest Quinnipiac poll, which came out two weeks ago and covered answers from 1,421 registered voters in all 50 states, gave Joe a 4-point lead over Trump, 49 to 45 percent, but since the poll’s margin of error of 2.6%, they are basically tied.
Foe me, the most interesting finding in this poll was that in a head-to-head matchup of Trump and Joe, the undecided vote was only 6%. Which tells me that these two guys have been around long enough that everyone knows who they are, so unless something very dramatic occurs between now and November 5th, the so-called ‘dog shit with glass vote’ (viz., David Sedaris’ forever remarkable 2008 column) won’t count for shit.
Incidentally, when respondents were asked their choice not just between Joe and Trump, but when the list of candidates included Kennedy, Cornel West and Jill Stein, Joe still had a tiny edge, but together then three other candidates received 21 percent, of which Kennedy received 15% support.
It should be added that Kennedy received 15% of the votes across every demographic category: age, gender, race, etc., but when Trump’s name was replaced by Haley as the GOP nominee, Biden was still the frontrunner, but Kennedy’s overall support jumped to nearly 25%.
Who the fuck are these people stating their support of RFK? Do they have any idea about how pernicious and dangerous his ideas are and how much his views are altogether different from the family political legacy which he claims to represent?
Anyway, since this poll was taken before Haley dropped out of the race, or at least will stop pretending to campaign until and unless Trump gets trundled off to jail, what matters are the numbers quoted above which show Joe and Trump essentially to be tied.
For all the talk about Joe’s weak poll numbers versus how Trump continues to enthrall his ‘base,’ let me give you a somewhat different perspective on what the poll numbers really mean up through today.
What they mean to me is only one thing, which is that Trump has been going full blast with a Presidential campaign for the last four years and Joe stopped campaigning the last time around on November 3, 2020, and has just re-started his Presidential campaign last week.
Believe it or not, Trump has held 161 big rallies since he was elected in 2016. And this number would have been substantially higher if he hadn’t suspended in-person events because of the ‘Chinese flu’ between March and June of 2020.
How many in-person, big events did Biden hold in 2020 both for the primary and general campaigns? Maybe a dozen, maybe a few more.
How many political rallies did Joe hold from the day he was inaugurated on January 21, 2021, until today? Try – ready? – none. Not one, fucking one, i.e., zero – none.
Now, let’s do a little math. According to a website called trumpgolfcount.com, Trump played golf at least 150 times during his four years as President, of which at least 50 of these outings occurred either in New Jersey or Palm Beach.
Let’s assume that for each round of golf played at either of those two locations, that Trump was away from his White House office for 2 days, otherwise he was only off the premises for one day. Let’s also assume that for each big rally, Trump was away from the White House for at least one day.
At the very least, of the 1,461 days which covered Trump’s entire four-year term, he was out playing golf for roughly 25% of the time he was allegedly running a corporation known as the U.S.A.
My wife, who is the senior attending pediatrician at a teaching hospital branch of the state medical school, gets 3 weeks of vacation and is either in the clinic or on call every other day. So, her vacation days count less than 6% of every working year, and the guy who is allegedly running the world’s largest and most important political operation gets four times more free time?
This is the reason why the Joe versus Trump polls are right now so close, because the Fake News media doesn’t sit around the Oval Office all day long watching Joe managing things day after day after day.
Wait and see what’s going to happen to those poll numbers as Joe transitions from manager to campaigner over the nest couple of months.
Just wait.
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