And now for a word about polls – and about election terror

And now for a word about polls – and about election terror

Here’s a good article on the subject of polls and how difficult it is to do them or to analyze what they mean.

I have stopped even trying. And yet I still read articles on the subject, some giving hope, some taking it away, and I try to maintain a semblance of equanimity. I try – but I intermittently fail, big time, because this is the first election about which I’ve ever felt a fair amount of what I’d call terror.

I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve never missed voting in a presidential election since my first one in 1972. Until 2004 I always voted for the Democrat, and I always took a calm approach to losing. I preferred that the Democrat would win, but I was never afraid of the opponent.

Maybe that was because the opponent was a Republican – always a patriot and certainly never a leftist (even back then I was for the first and against the second). But I also think it was because all the candidates were people who were competent at the very least, and who really weren’t all that ideologically apart – not compared to today, that is.

In 2004 there were three new factors operating for me. The first was that I was on the right. The second is that I was more politically active and aware than before. And the third was the candidacy of John Kerry, whom I detested and had detested from the time he came on the political scene in the early 70s, when I was still a Democrat. That’s how much I detested him – it predated my political change.

So I wasn’t calm in 2004. I was nervous, anxious, frightened, and then relieved when Kerry lost and Bush won. And then in 2008 my level of fear was high, as well, because I recognized Obama as a very smooth and yet hidden leftist, and I sensed that his promised fundamental transformation of America (details largely unspecified when he was campaigning) would be a lot more fundamental and leftist than he was letting on.

2012 was similar. I feared Obama would be re-elected, and sure enough he was. Then in 2016, my fear shifted to the primaries, when I watched with growing alarm as Donald Trump, of all people, became the nominee, and I thought that meant that Hillary Clinton would become the next president. I feared the election of either of them, although for very different reasons. I probably don’t have to explain why I feared Hillary becoming president, but my fear of Trump was predicated on the sense that electing him would be a plunge into the unknown and that he would be a dangerously loose cannon in way over his head.

So on Election Night in 2016 I was resigned to a bad outcome. Either outcome would be bad, the known bad versus the unknown bad. That was my assessment, and I’m pleased to say that I was wrong about Trump and later pleasantly surprised.

But that only ups the fear quotient this time around, because I see this battle as the most important one of my lifetime, and the most bizarre as well. So that’s why I now use the word “terror” for the feeling that washes over me from time to time, and which I try to beat off.

Joe Biden, like John Kerry, happens to be another politician I’ve always disliked, starting when I was a Democrat. Even back then Biden seemed mendacious, corrupt, and on the wrong side of most issues. But Biden has now turned a cognitive corner and is not even up to his previous level of functioning, so that makes it even worse – and Harris is a leftist hack and laughing loon.

So that’s one factor. Another is that I have grown to think Trump does know what he’s doing and I like a great deal of what he’s done. But both of those things pale beside my conviction that this is far more than a battle between these two men, or between the Democrat and Republican parties of old. The Democrats have gone off the far left deep end, and they are deadly serious about it, and way too much of the populace seems either ignorant of this fact or approving of it. In addition, the MSM and most other cultural and even financial institutions are completely onboard. That is disturbing beyond my powers to describe.

It’s a lonely fight for Trump and the Republicans. But even if Trump wins, that’s just a finger in the dike. We’d better figure out what to do about the threatening floods.

https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/10/31/and-now-for-a-word-about-polls-and-about-election-terror/