Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   (530) 515-2137   Red Bluff Daily News   9/01/2020

Dems are toast, but don’t get cocky

This is not an encouraging message—Democrats are all but toast—for local progressive partisans who may have thought their “convention in little boxes” was cheerful, profound or even mildly persuasive to anyone outside their ever-shrinking tent. If you don’t talk to anyone that supports President Trump, have only fellow leftists in your circle of acquaintances, watch only CNN, MSNBC, the networks and PBS—this would obviously come as a shock suggesting delusion on our side.

Predictions being a bit tricky, the path to reelection holding obstacles for Trump, and with polling suggesting a solid Biden/Harris lead, you still must consider whether Dems have a Dukakis or Mondale level landslide defeat on their horizon. Or will Biden recreate Clinton’s upset of a sitting Republican president? The former is, to this writer, a near certainty.

Taking polls at face value, Biden’s double-digit lead has been cut nearly in half; “Early Polling Finds Trump Getting a Convention Bounce,” (P. Mirengoff, Powerlineblog.com). Ironically, Trump runs as both an underdog and an anti-status quo cheerleader for America, for law and order, for economic recovery and for renewed normalcy post-pandemic.

Polling by Morning Consult and YouGov have Biden’s lead falling from 10 and 9 points to 6 points in each poll. Rasmussen and Zogby both found approval trending up, even over 50 percent. In the Hill-HarrisX poll, Trump’s approval is 24 percent among Black voters, and 32 percent among Hispanic voters. If he gets near that in the election, the popular vote majority—together with an Electoral College landslide—will not only affirm Trump’s place in history, but will also keep the U.S. Senate in, and return the House majority to, Republican control.

To Democrats and the news media (a redundancy), higher network and cable viewership for the DNC vs. the RNC reflected their reality, but then the blowout numbers for streaming viewers (we streamed CSPAN for every minute) favoring the RNC gave a 26 million viewer edge to the Republicans. Money talks as well, with $6 million more going to Trump than to Biden. 

  

The media predictably expressed adulation for the DNC, platitudes for Biden’s ho-hum reading (without losing his place and only a few mumbles), and endless, ad nauseum descriptions of the Republican convention as “dark.” The Democrats seemed to think Hollywood star power, together with Trump-demonization, was the ticket to the hearts and minds of Americans. The Republicans simply provided actual Americans with hearts and minds and stories of inspiration, overcoming hardships, rising to leadership, embracing hope, opportunity and accomplishment. Dems sealed their fate.

To the many local Catholic voters, look up and consider whether “Kamala Harris is an anti-Catholic bigot,” as Newt Gingrich persuasively writes at Foxnews.com, 8/15. Dem mouthpieces offer overly-fierce defenses of Joe Biden’s “devout” Catholic faith, but he favors 1) abortion up to the moment of delivery, 2) forcing Catholic nuns and charities to subsidize abortion services for employees, and 3) forcing Catholic adoption agencies to place children with same-sex couples.

Harris’ record includes: 1) confirming openly anti-Catholic federal judges, 2) prosecuting Little Sisters of the poor, 3) closing Catholic Hospitals that don’t join her union allies, 4) favoring taxpayer-paid abortions up until birth and 5) denying medical care to babies that have survived an abortion procedure.

Ironically, Kamala Harris unintentionally helped to overturn California’s magazine ban by referring, as CA Attorney General, to a 2017 study finding minorities are less likely to call 911 in an emergency. She was quoted by name by a 9^th Circuit judge who reasoned that limiting the size of a gun magazine would disproportionately impact rural and minority gun owners’ self-defense.

Read “How Biden Just Blew Up the Claim That He’s an Honest, Decent Guy,” by John Lott (Townhall.com, 8/21). While Joe Biden’s character was praised by convention speakers, he displayed a mean, disingenuous side, saying that Trump defended “white supremacists and white nationalists” as “fine people” after the 2017 riots in Charlottesville. Multiple fact-checkers affirm Trump only referred to the “fine people” on “both sides” of removing a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Joe Biden lied.

Biden also told two whoppers in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Saying that Trump “screwed up” the good economy he inherited from Obama, simply defies the facts. The unemployment rate, which dropped after the financial crash to 4.7 % at the end of Obama’s term, continued to drop to 3.6 % just before the Wu-flu hit and politicians shut down the economy. Moreover, the average GDP growth under Obama (after the recession ended in June, 2009) was about 2.2 %; GDP growth under Trump (prior to pandemic-induced shutdowns) was about 2.5 %; that’s not “screwing up.”

“In Just 72 Hours, Joe Biden Might Have Paved the Way for the Democratic Party to be Totally Screwed in 2020,” by Matt Vespa (Townhall.com, 8/22), points to Biden’s answer to ABC’s David Muir. Biden: “I would shut it (the economy) down. I would listen to the scientists.” Compare: Republican Gov. Kristi Noem kept South Dakota open, urged cautious practices, maintaining economic health—1-2 deaths/day; New Zealand imposed a confine-everyone-to-home lockdown for months, destroying their economy, minimizing deaths but reopening brings Wu-flu resurgence. Uganda: open economy, over-the-counter HCQ, 30 deaths.

Proving Reagan’s adage that “liberals aren’t ignorant, they just know so many things that aren’t so,” Post Office protesters Ms. McIver and Ms. Gehrung stated things that simply aren’t so (DN, 8/24). There has been no “manipulation,” no “recent changes made to remove collection boxes and sorting machines around the country…to slow down the mail service.” Go back to last Tuesday’s column and review the seven factual points I made refuting the hoax that Trump and DeJoy are “slowing the USPS to sabotage…mail-in voting.”