It’s been nine days since President Joe Biden was threatened by the Democrat Party, and forced to “voluntarily” step down from his re-election campaign. We are now in the middle of the Paris Olympics, so most Americans are distracted by the spectacle of obese women and drag queens cavorting in Paris, rather than being focused on American politics.
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Thus, it is a good time for one of my periodic evaluations of the state of the Presidential race.
As always, it is good to begin with the Real Clear Politics average. Former President Donald Trump leads Vice President Kamala Harris by 48.1 percent to 46.1 percent, a 2 percent advantage. President Biden’s job approval is at 41.4 percent, which continues to be historically low. This number is similar, or even lower, to the approval ratings of former Presidents George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Donald Trump in the last year of their presidencies. All four men lost their re-election campaigns. Harris, as Biden’s Vice President, is likely to be hurt by that low Biden approval number.
On June 27, my last column before the Presidential debate that destroyed Joe Biden, I noted that Trump had a lead in the average of 1.5 percent. He had consistently led Joe Biden in the average since September of 2023. This was in contrast to 2016 and 2020, when Trump almost never led in any polls, let alone in any average.
In another, more recent column, I noted that Donald Trump’s retrospective job approval ratings as President in a July 2024 poll was far higher than that of Joe Biden’s – 51 percent to 41 percent.
I have also frequently noted that on election day, Biden, or the Democrat, needs to be ahead of Trump by at least 3 points in the national popular vote to be assured of winning enough battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – to carry the electoral college.
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So, what we have here is a great reset, where the Democrats ousted their collapsing and obviously senile candidate in favor of his understudy, who is not senile. And, they are roughly back to where they were before Biden’s senility was revealed on national television to all voters. But – and this is important – where they were before is still convincingly behind in the race; the Democrats are still the underdogs for the Presidential election of 2024.
I am sure my saying this will surprise you. Since Biden stepped down and Harris replaced him, the mainstream media and the Democrats – but I repeat myself – have endlessly celebrated their supposed good fortune. The polling, we have been told, has become unbelievably rosy. Huge amounts of money have been raised from the exuberant Democrat masses and elites. So, how can Donald Trump still be the favorite over Kamala Harris? To paraphrase Lisa Simpson from the television show, The Simpsons, how can Vice President Harris not be ahead in the race when her campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train? Why is she not more popular?
Well, my friends, the MSM/Democrats are BSing you. They are BSing themselves as well.
Remember, it’s not a lie if they believe it.
As I just documented, the polling for Harris is not better than Biden’s polling was before the debate.
Further, their monetary boost is largely meaningless. The Biden campaign was hemorrhaging money because Democrat donors were angry at him for his poor debate, and they wanted him to step aside from the campaign. So, as a tool to make him do so, they cut off his funding. Now, having gotten what they wanted, they have turned the spigot back on. It also has inspired some additional donations, among the great mass of Democrats, but that is only because Democrats are human, too, and as humans they are understandably happy about no longer being chained to the dying anvil that was Joe Biden that was dragging them down into the murky depths of the lake named Guaranteed Election 2024 Loser Lake.
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In the end, both Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump will have enough money to run their campaigns as they wish.
A huge crutch for Kamala Harris is that most of the underlying facts of the Presidential race are still the same. As I have explained before, the economy is still bad, with inflation harming working families; the border is still out of control, with illegal aliens attacking American citizens almost every week; and the world is still on fire because of Biden’s appeasement, with anti-Semites in the Democrat party inspired by him to riot on the streets of the U.S. Kamala Harris is his Vice President, so she is indelibly tied to the Biden administration, and she has made no effort to distance herself from Biden (unlike former Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968).
Plus, with Kamala Harris the candidate, the Democrats are burdened with an obvious diversity pick who is very far to the political left. Which the Republicans are in the process of exposing to the swing voters.
In reality, there are new facts that should be intruding on the Democrat irrational exuberance over the Presidential race. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’ polling numbers have increased, meaning that they are fewer undecided voters in the race. And Donald Trump is almost always ahead, often close to 50%, in this multi-candidate race. Uusually, the closer we get to the election, the remaining undecided voters tend to break for the “out” party, figuring that the “in” party has screwed up the situation, and it is time to see what the “out” party can do. (And in one poll, the undecided are indeed leaning towards Trump.) Further, here, the candidate for the “out” party, Donald Trump, has already done the job as President, and swing voters readily acknowledge that he did a good job. They just don’t like his mean tweets.
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But mean tweets are a small price to pay for a growing and stable economy and nation.