A Few Thoughts Five Days Out
Anonymous
Yesterday, I highlighted a tweet from Oliver Darcey of CNN admonishing Fox News for airing the President’s rallies, along with Biden and Obama’s rallies. Darcey claimed that because President Trump lies all the time, he should be held to a different standard of coverage than his opponent and the former President on the campaign trail.
Then, late yesterday, Miles Taylor announced he was Anonymous, the supposed White House whistleblower, whose credentials have been vastly overstated by the New York Times. Taylor is a CNN contributor who lied to Anderson Cooper when asked directly if he was Anonymous.
CNN, in a statement late yesterday, suggested it will not fire Mr. Taylor. Maybe the network’s reporters should not be telling other networks how to cover people who lie.
Also, several reporters I spoke to firmly believe Mr. Taylor is taking the fall for someone else. If, as some have speculated, Anonymous was a group effort coordinated by Mr. Taylor but led by someone else, that would more accurately explain why the New York Times inflated Mr. Taylor’s credentials. A lot of people have speculated about Jon Huntsman.
But, as Taylor now is fully embracing the label, the New York Times itself lied about his credentials and qualifications to be considered a senior administration official. Also, the left is cheering on someone who was involved in the kids in cages stuff.
Bobulinski
In Georgia, Mr. Trump’s campaign has replaced their ads that highlight the President’s economic success and highlight Joe Biden’s tax increase plan. Now, they are running ads that try, in one minute of radio time, to explain the Hunter Biden story and suggest Joe Biden is compromised and cannot be trusted to be President.
Mr. Trump wins in every poll on the issue of the economy and job creation. He is abandoning the one winning message for one that takes at least 40 seconds to make a passable explanation for people already a bit familiar with the story. This is not a winning message to add new voters and the existing voters are already turning out. It strikes me as scratching an itch. After four years of his family being labeled all sorts of awful things and accused of being compromised by the Russians, Trump gets to claim Biden is no better.
But that won’t win Trump the election and it takes him off message with five days left.
Polling
If Biden does win, one thing we can be assured of is that all the people who have told us the polls are all wrong will continue to believe the polls were all wrong. We’re already starting to see these sorts of things.
Again, focus on the averages. I actually think the Monmouth Poll in Georgia is an outlier. No other poll shows the President doing as badly in Georgia with white suburban women. I think that poll is wrong. But the polling averages are a good way to sort through that stuff and the averages still don’t look good for the President.
If the polling is wrong this time, a whole industry is going to go away. If they are right, prepare yourselves for a Biden presidency and a whole lot of excuse-making on how the polls were still wrong and all the data showing senior citizens are tired of having to think about presidential tweets all the time really is no big deal.
In the run up to the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton was up 1.6% a few days before the election in the polling average. She won with 2.1% while the polling averages closed at 3.2%. Biden is over 7% in the polling average right now and over 3% in the swing states. Everyone is freaked out by 2016 still, but my job isn’t to tell you what you want to hear and be your cheerleader. It’s to tell you what is actually going on.
What’s going on is that the President’s team has taken a winnable race that is close in the swing states and turned it into a primer on Hunter Biden’s business dealings instead of the President’s record on jobs and the economy. While that appears to be getting some Republicans to come home to the President, it is not getting him new voters.
Twitter and Censorship
That Twitter will block the New York Post, but not Holocaust denialism, is all you need to know about the company. The woke leftists who run Twitter are willing to block an American news outlet, but not the people who excuse the slaughter of Jews in World War II.
If that doesn’t bother you, you’ve got issues.
Say goodbye to pollsters. They will need a new career path. We need mental health workers. I’ll be happy to train them. Call me Wednesday.
Perhaps after 4 years of Trump being in the news every day, there are undecided voters who haven't heard Trump (or his supporters) ever focus on jobs or the economy. But I find that hard to believe as Trump talks about it in nearly every public appearance he makes. And even if there were such naive voters, would they really be swayed by a last minute advertisement, since Trump ads have been running in battleground states for some time already? In contrast, the allegations of Bobulinski about Biden-family corruption are a major issue if true and Senators like Johnson (WI) are saying they are. These allegations are being blocked by the media so Trump made the decision to go around the media, first in the final debate, and now with advertisements.
If one looks at the national polls, the RCP average (3.2) was brought closer to the final result (2.1) by a small number of outlier polls, like LA Times / USC Tracking that had Trump winning by a few points for the last 6 months (which was a far different result than most polls that were predicting a Hillary land-side. The USC poll came under considerable criticism from the left because it followed an alternate methodology in 2016 ( https://dailytrojan.com/2016/10/23/uscla-times-poll-criticized-survey-methods/ ). To avoid criticism in 2020, this poll is using the same the methodology as the other 2016 polls and predicting a huge Biden win. But in the last 2 days, I have read that when this poll uses a similar alternate methodology to 2016 it returns a similar result. The alternate methodology used by the USC poll in 2016 is similar to the strategy used by Trafalgar, which was the only poll that came close to accurately predicting results in WI, MI and PA. I advise everybody to wait a week before making bold predictions about how 2020 will be the same/different than 2016.
The average for the state polls for WI, MI, PA were simply not accurate and national polls are virtually irrelevant. If