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Election 2020: Competing Realities
Just fifty-some odd hours before the last of the polls close and the voting stops…well, not even that is clear in these trying times…we have two very different realities at play for people’s attention. Both are current on my news scanning tabs this afternoon.
The first, from that new competitor for the braindead MSNBC audience:
The second via Instapundit:
HMM: Poll: Donald Trump set to win US presidency by electoral college landslide. “Donald Trump is on course to win four more years in the White House with a one point lead in the popular win, the final Democracy Institute poll for the Sunday Express has found. . . . Significantly, the President has, according to the latest findings, maintained a four point lead of 49 percent to 45 percent in the key swing states including Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It means he is on course to easily win the electoral college by 326 to 212 votes against his Democrat rival in a result which would shock the world even more than his astonishing defeat of Hilary Clinton in 2016. The Democracy Institute/Sunday Express poll has throughout the campaign been one of the few to predict a Trump victory since March. This is because unlike other polls it only looks at people identifying as likely voters instead of just registered to vote and it has tried to identify the shy Trump vote.”
[emphasis added]
To be fair, the first is consistent with all the headlines beamed to us for months now. The prediction in the second is consistent with every other indication the rational and discerning consumer of American politics would have sensed over the same time period. However, if true, the highlighted text is likely a surprise to everyone…again, if true, such data has been blacked out from everything I have seen to-date. (“Maintained” seems a very odd choice of words.)
The next two days are going to be rather interesting to say the least…and somebody’s reality is going to be shattered.
Published in General
I suppose I should post the Instapundit info over at RushBabe49.com. I have followers all over the world.
Next week has been exhausting…
God I hope the pollsters eat their words this election . . .
By the way, regarding THISCLOSE IN TEX, if it really is then the country is lost. It may be lost anyway but I don’t believe for a second it is anything that can be called “close” in Texas.
From Powerline:
[emphasis added]
Hmmm. 10 to 30 million additional voters. Makes one wonder about how the polling organizations modeled this spread and where the assumed those voters would be.
Via Instapundit:
Or….wishful thinking?
It will be interesting to see how many polls tighten up substantially in the next 24 hours. No matter who wins, I suspect the polling industry is going to look very bad – OK, worse than they already did – in the near future.
From over at RushBabe49.com.
Our people and their people.
Thanks for the link.
Election Eve 2020:
I admit that I cannot and will not watch MSNBC, CNN…in fact, I just don’t watch TV news of any kind anymore…and I get my sense of the “mood” of those people only from my daily glance at Drudge. As such, my sense of THEIR PERSPECTIVE is that there has been a whole lot of silence on the lack of a meaningful campaign by Team Biden and that the hyper-activity of the Trump campaign over the last 2-3 weeks is clearly desperation. That latter point may very well be true. However, I don’t know how different a Trump run down the stretch would look…considering it is his last campaign and he doesn’t seem to do things half-assed…if he thought/knew he was in the lead. This is who he is and this is what he does.
Regardless, he fights. He plays offense…he plays aggressive offense. I hope those on the farm team of our version of the Washington Generals are taking notes.
CBS appears to want to beat the Monday morning rush:
I posit that if “Biden+10” was real on the Sunday morning before the election there is no viable Trump “serge scenario” that a respectable news agency would waste their brand on. Interesting times…
From the Instapundit comments:
Either way, our media will never recover from this 4-year temper tantrum.
Even the polls of Ricochet’s Crazy Aunt’s (and their cats) seems stuck on the narrative:
How embarrassing.
When I see all the headlines in the MSM, I feel like I’m watching a boring sports event where the announcers are trying their best to hold on to the audience:
Announcer #1: Well, it looks like the second half is about to start. What do you think I will take Tech to win.
Announcer #2: Forty-two unanswered points. But don’t count Tech out just yet. Here’s how they could still pull off the upset . . .
Then the guy goes on a long, rambling discourse, each sentence beginning with the word “if” . . .
You didn’t grow that hair all by yourself Mr. Biden.
I think that the Trump Train Thugs swarming the Biden bus in Texas, and the blocking of traffic will swing the last minute undecideds, and will dishearten Republicans who never saw such thuggish behavior from supporters of Romney, McCain, W., Dole, H.W., and Reagan, all of whom I voted for with great enthusiasm. If non-Trump Train Republicans are turned off by this, and they see 100,000 new COVID-19 cases, they may very well decide to sit this election out.
All they did was drive alongside the bus. The only threat was to the easily-hurt feelings of the Democrats in the bus.
The only actual violence (aka “thuggery”) was by the Biden supporter who swerved into the truck driven by a Trump supporter. Much like the other massive samples of leftist thuggery we’ve seen over the decades.
Why is it that you guys always focus on the smaller things (A couple of dozen scary Trump people driving down the highway in big pickup trucks? Terrifying!) while ignoring the flat-out-criminal things your side does?
You keep pretending that you’re some sort of “rational anti-Trumper conservative,” but you’re just not.
Well didn’t the Republicans in Texas lose the court decision regarding curbside ballot harvesting ? All these technicalities about voting have impaired our rights as citizens to make sure our votes count.
Who does this? I don’t remember Matt Romney or Meghan McCain or the Bush twins urging supporters to give a good old Texas greeting to Democrats.
I think that the Texas bus incident is the “October surprise” of this campaign. Karl Rove has suggested that W. lost a million votes due to his very old DUI coming out on the Friday before the election in 2000. This led to the Florida recount agony and W. not being the popular vote winner.
I saw something odd at lunch. A Biden supporter was on a pedestrian overpass and waving an American flag. He wasn’t standing on it and it wasn’t on fire.
Excuse me. Curbside ballot “harvesting“? How about curbside “voting”, based upon the emergency COVID-19 situation? This curbside voting has been twice upheld by the Texas Supreme Court, and where some misguided Republicans were seeking to invalidate some 127,000 votes? Please note that the Texas Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of curbside voting, and that every one of the Texas Supreme Court members had been appointed by a Republican Governor.
This attitude towards our fellow Americans is exactly why Trump is facing defeat. As for me, well I am a registered Republican.
I doubt very much that Karl Rove was right about this. My dad, a lifetime Republican actually voted for Al Gore as he felt Gore was more intelligent and had more governmental experience. (My mom almost made him sleep in a doghouse for the rest of that very cold Chicago winter.)
For almost everyone else, the feeling was either that Bush Jr would be like his dad, or else that Al Gore was the greatest thing since sliced bread. For Republicans, being like Bush The Elder was a good thing. For liberals it was a bad thing. Some of us voted third party, as we thought both men seemed very much involved in the “The One Big Money Party.”
I renounce and denounce anyone who blocks highways, be they Antifa, BLM, Bernie Bros., or Trump Train Thugs.
So, how many voters will Biden lose because of his criminal activities with his son and brother?
I’ll bet the DUI had nothing to do with the closeness of the 2000 race. What Rove said is sheer speculation.
Yet you can’t manage to denounce all of the other things the Democrats are doing, because Orange Man Bad. A Democrat could take money from China and Russia, support burning down cities for political reasons, and be in the final stages of dementia, but you’re going to speak out against Trump because, er… one group of Trump people did what dozens of Democrat supporters have done. After you accuse some other Trump supporters of doing something they did not do.
Not to mention that you keep calling the one group that isn’t committing violence “thugs.”
Well I’m not sure if they consider themselves fellow Americans. At the Biden rallies in Portland, Louisville, and elsewhere this summer there were plenty of flags being burned. People at Trump rallies proudly fly the American flag. So it was odd to see someone holding a Biden sign and an American flag.
There was a recent poll, of unknown validity, asking people about countries that they found favorable. One of the top five gaps between political parties was America, 95% of Republicans were positive and 68% of Democrats were positive.
Another note on Sunday evening from Instapundit…a rather (potentially) ominous sentence referencing Biden’s collapse – or “fading” in the polls – in Minnesota to only 41%:
Now, from Monday evening:
I went to work this morning never thinking that one would voluntarily wander into the conversation during the day. All I can say is, “Welcome to a front page conversation.”