To know where we are today, we must look at where we were four years ago. Before covid and with the economy really booming, the national polls all showed Biden — who was far behind in the Democrat polls — with a big lead over Trump. The average of 11 polls in August and September 2019 gave Biden a 7.2 point lead. Fox News gave him a 14 point lead.
Trump never had a lead in the average of these polls in the 2020 cycle, and yet on Election Day he had more voters than Biden. Only the ability to stuff the ballot box with mailed-in votes thwarted him, and even that was not enough. On election night, the CIA (or whoever coordinated the steal) shut down the vote-counting in swing states to allow a cavalry of counterfeit votes to cascade in and save the banana republic.
That is where we were at this point in that campaign. Trump was 7.2 points behind — before covid.
Today he has a 0.5 point lead in the average of the last 11 polls. Given the margin for bias and BS, it actually could be a double-digit lead. Perhaps the polls show Trump supporters no longer are afraid to admit it to a stranger on the other end of a telephone call.
Those 11 polls are all post mugshot. Corporate media and the federal government fear the people will rise and demand their freedom again. He threatens their control and corruption. The indictments aren’t working and ignoring him won’t go away. I can almost see their trepidation.
Which leads me to Dana Perino, who was my favorite spokeswoman for Dubya. Sorry Tony Snow. Bright, articulate and well-prepared, she set the gold standard.
Now she is just another talking head on the Paul Ryan Express known as Fox News nodding along with whatever the day’s narrative is. She will be moderating the second RINO debate.
It is not really a debate because debates don’t need a moderator peppering participants with petty questions. A debate is you let Judge Douglas address the question of slavery for 60 minutes, Abe Lincoln respond for 90 minutes and then the judge makes a rebuttal for 30 minutes. TV debates deliberately are nothing like that — and the TV people dare blame that on the candidates.
TV wants ratings. This is why they treat the presidential election like a cage match rather than a serious matter. Trump saw that and played the 2015-2016 debates like a violin. His first debate on Fox in 2015 drew a record 24 million viewers. Megyn Kelly came out of her sick bed to ask him about calling women names. He said only Rosie O’Donnell and won the nomination, much to the chagrin of Fox News executives.
This year, he boycotted the first debate. Fox drew half the audience.
Perino wants to bring the Trump magic to her little show but she must do it without The Donald. She wants Republicans to attack Trump, likely in the hopes of his gracing the next RINO debate with his presence.
As if.
She said, “They’re not going to be able to put a dent in his lead if they don’t. President Trump has a commanding and seemingly very enduring lead. It’s up to these candidates to show why they think that they would be better.”
Her rooting interest — she doesn’t like Trump — reflects the RNC crowd. Her bias makes her unfit to be on that stage, but then, who is fit? Chet Huntley died five decades ago and with him, so did objectivity.
But why is she not pressing them to attack Biden? He’s the president. He’s the leader of the Democrats. He’s the reason we surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban, have the worst inflation in 40 years, and are a joke on the international scene.
And like it or not, every Republican candidate on that stage has vowed to support Trump if he is the nominee. They signed pledges stating this to enter the first debate.
Krispy Kreme Christie of course is a big fat liar. He supports prosecuting Trump. He has vowed to stalk Trump throughout the campaign. With supporters like him, who needs Democrats? Christie is vying to be the next Mitt Romney.
Trump will be in Detroit on RINO night, meeting with striking car workers.
Politico reported, “Trump has not officially weighed in on the strike, although he posted to Truth Social on Sunday night, ‘The United Autoworkers are being sold down the drain with this all Electric Car SCAM.’ Along with Trump’s visit to Detroit, his team also plans to release a radio ad targeting union workers.”
UAW President Shawn Fain laid out the welcome alligator-filled moat for Trump, stating, “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.
“We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class.”
20 years ago, Fain would have been called a communist. Today, he’s just another mainstream Democrat.
A confrontation between Fain and Trump would knock the Fox RINO debate to the In Other News hole on TV newscasts, which is where it belongs. Such a confrontation also would show that the communist Fain no more represents the workers than Chester Cheetos does.
Trump isn’t Chester Cheetos. Our president is a billionaire who sides with workers, be they ironworkers on the 40th floor or chambermaids and golf pros. He may not know what a Blizzard is but he knows the people who the people making them are.
He caught Democrats flat-footed. Politico reported, “Some Joe Biden allies fear that Donald Trump is outmaneuvering them on the auto workers’ strike with his decision to head to Detroit for a speech next week.
“Democrats close to the White House said they saw Trump’s trip as a plainly cynical ploy to gain political advantage from the current United Auto Workers strike at three plants. But they also worry it is a sign that the ex-president had a more sophisticated campaign than in previous cycles — and that Biden’s operation needs to step it up.”
I know the UAW workers are not popular. Conservatives complain they make too much money. Has anyone ever even looked at a modern car factory? These (mostly) men are highly trained and highly skilled.
My argument for them is the CEOs are busy sacking GM, Ford and whatever they call Chrysler nowadays ahead of the inevitable collapse that moving to battery-operated cars will bring. As Janis Joplin sang, “Honey, get it while you can.”
Remember what happened to Youngstown on September 19, 1977, when Corporate America began dismantling American manufacturing. Companies blamed the unions.
Salena Zito wrote, “It was just before 7 a.m., and the fog that had settled over the river was beginning to lift. As the sun began to streak through the mist, the men made their way into the labyrinth of buildings where they worked.
“In the next hour, their lives would change forever.
“From then on, this date in 1977 would be known as Black Monday in the Steel Valley, which stretches from Mahoning and Trumbull counties in Ohio eastward toward Pittsburgh. It is the date when Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly furloughed 5,000 workers in one day.
“The bleeding never stopped.
“Within the next 18 months, US Steel announced that the nation’s largest steel producer was also shutting down 16 plants across the nation, including their Ohio Works in Youngstown, a move that eliminated an additional 4,000 workers here. That announcement came one day before Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp. said they were cutting thousands of jobs at their facilities in the Mahoning Valley, too.
“Within a decade, 40,000 jobs were gone. Within that same decade, 50,000 people had left the region, and by the next decade, that number was up to 100,000. Today the 22 miles of booming steel mills and the support industries that once lined the Mahoning River have mostly disappeared — either blown up, dismantled or reclaimed by nature.
“If a bomb had hit this region, the scar would be no less severe on its landscape.”
The steel companies sold America out. The car companies are doing the same. Now do you see my point? Honey, get it while you can, UAW.
Somehow all this leads me back to Perino. She is a mouthpiece for the man and she is very good at it. She served George W. Bush well and she now serves Rupert Murdoch. I am not knocking her, but you can.
In demanding the RINO debaters attack Trump, she shows the very real fear inside Washington of a return of The Donald. If they were smart, they would let him in and the RINOs would work with him if only to quiet the revolution because if they don’t — if they manage somehow to stop him again — they won’t like who the roused rabble turn to next.
Not one bit.
To know where we are today means we must remember where we were yesterday, which means to know where we will be tomorrow, we must know where we are today. Right now, we are in Trump nation. It doesn’t by all the, um, stuff Republicans were shoveling to us over the years.
My advice to Fox is to accept a second Trump presidency. The Establishment survived four years of him. It will survive a second heaping helping of his inhospitality
This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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Don, do you know that the RNC is controlled by Trump’s hand picked girl, Ronna McDaniel? He endorsed her three times and lent his network to lobby for her the fourth. There are establishment forces they hate his guts because they hate our guts, but we need to acknowledge how much of the party he now controls. His pick is the Speaker of the House too, as Trump personally lobbied for McCarthy as Speaker. Let’s acknowledge reality.
Fox is still very pro-Trump. In 2016, they backed Jeb. Then they had a fling with Rubio. Then after South Carolina, they went all in for Trump. The break with him happened election night 2020. There are still many elements that support him within Fox, including many of the hosts.
The debate moderators were a disaster. Perino was just introducing and praising Hillary Clinton and a Clinton Foundation event a few weeks ago. A couple years ago, she was promoting transitioning children, running a puff piece on it. So, that’s where she is. The leftist from Univison was even worse, asking all her questions from the left.
Fox has been doing this for decades. They have bene the gate keeper for years of what gets promoted and talked about on the right. That is starting to fade, but it long predates Trump. They just slurped him for a few years, so many people think this is a new development. It’s who they’ve always been.
The two debates this year would be the most watched primary debates in history other than the 2016 cycle. The ratings are actually really good. The execution of them has been atrocious, but people are still watching.
What they can’t do is compare to a debate with Trump. The man puts on a show and draws people in whether they love him, hate him or just brought their popcorn. Thr audience will double if Trump is added to the debate, if not triple. That’s just the entertainment value he adds for viewers and networks.
He can’t draw that on his own. When it comes down to actual views, his Tucker interview was watched by about 7% of the primary electorate and 32% watched the first debate. Put him on a stage with a foil and the ratings will break the counter.
We just need to put the numbers in context. These debates are well watched compared to historical norms, just not compared to one with Trump there.
I have couple more bones to pick. RINO means Republican in Name Only. If half or more of the party’s elected officials, voted for by the party base, are RINOs, then your definition is far too broad. Words mean things. Given that’s the case, the other people are more apt to be RINOs than the majority running things.
A better descriptor might be GOPe or even CINO, where you distinguish between conservative and Republican. Even that has problems, as Trump and the points of your article are more populist than conservative.
The second point is on attacking Biden. With all due respect, that’s a boring snoozefest. We all despise Biden. We all think he sucks. We all think he’s a corrupt, old dementia patient. What good does it do for us to set in a circle and talk about how much we hate Biden? In the general election, sure. This is the chance to put up our best candidate. For that, they need to be measured next to each other, not next to Biden. I want to hear why DeSantis is better than Trump and why Trump is better than DeSantis. I know they are both better than Biden. No one learns anything from being a bunch of bobbleheads.
Oh, one more.
If the polls were way off in 2020 (they were), then why can we assume they are correct now or “skewed” the same direction?
We can’t. The biggest issue with polling is that they are cheap, lazy and incompent and the data we are being fed is not good. There’s probably some gaslighting too, but the main issue is bad polling, not biased polling. Good polling is hard and expensive and getting harder. The media wants talking point, not accuracy. The good stuff is the internal polling done by campaigns who are paying to know the truth.
Here is the RCP average compared to the final result for each of the last 5 elections (that’s as far as they have data listed).
2020 – D +2.7
2016 – D +1.2
2012 – R +3.2
2008 – D +0.3
2004 – D +0.9
The worst polling error of the last 5 years was in the GOP’s favor. 2008 and 2004 were really good and the national polling in 2016 wasn’t bad (helped by a few good Trump polls, offsetting the heavy Hillary ones). These cycles average 0.38% in the Democrats’ favor.
I’m not telling you the polling is wrong and Trump isn’t ahead. I’m telling you a direct comparison to 2020 isn’t a great idea. The polling just isn’t good.
I also thing there is an 80% chance Biden is not the nominee anyway, making it all a moot point.