There is too much news on television.
There. I said it. I never thought I would say it, but having multiple channels with news and commentary on 24 hours a day is way too much. Here's how I know.
We have been informed this week of the admission to the hospital of female pop star Madonna. I thought we had reached some sort of over-saturation when several news outlets reported on Lady Gaga's lasik surgical procedure several years ago, and we found out that Cindy Lauper has psoriasis. That's just more than we need, I think. And on top of that, now we know that the President sleeps with a C-PAP machine. Well good. So do I. It works. I'm not nearly so cranky or tired when I get up in the morning.
I'd be willing to bet that Trump needs one badly.
And how is it in a few short paragraphs, working through senseless stuff, that we get to Trump? Frankly, I just put that sentence there to make my point. I really don't care enough about the man or what he does to be interested, which is why I spend a lot less time these days watching any news outlets, "mainstream" as they are called, or the cable news networks. If I get an hour of MSNBC these days, that's a lot, and it is virtually impossible to watch an hour of cable news, even MSNBC, without seeing a disgusting image of the orange headed buffoon, or hearing about something he his doing, or how his poll numbers went up or down fourteen tenths of a half a point today because he belched after eating lunch at his Bedminster Country Club.
If there's twenty minutes of reporting on another slew of indictments for his incitement of the insurrection and attack on the capitol on January 6th, I'm interested. Otherwise, focus attention on something else, or I won't watch.
Polls on the Election Are Worthless
I'm looking down the rows of polls of two composites this morning. It's the same old same old same old. Joe Biden's job approval rating runs from two polls that have him at 48%, to two that have him at 39%, and everything in between. Trump approval goes as high as 43% and as low as 31%, with "disapprove" as high as 67% in two different YouGov polls and 65% in Morning Consult, and as low as 56% in another YouGov poll, which I assume are daily tracking polls, not averages. I've seen head to head with Biden in Joe's favor as much as 49-40, and with him behind by one, 43-42.
So I will draw on my own observations, ability to make political predictions, expertise of two degrees and a background in history, civics and political science, and instruction of high school and junior college students in Constitutional Law and American Government, and I'll do some speculating at this point, a year and a half away from the next election, and I'll leave it here so that my accuracy can be checked, if I, or some reader, remembers this that far along in the future.
I used to do this with my high school classes at the beginning of a school year. I would predict the outcome of an election, which states would be red, which ones blue, and guess the electoral totals. I missed one, the 2000 election between Bush and Gore, not because I didn't pick Florida to go red, which I did, but because I picked Tennessee to go blue, which would have given Gore the win without Florida. He lost the state by about 80,000 votes with some shenanigans going on there that may have suppressed the black vote. But that got lost in the reporting about Florida. And I started with Reagan and Carter in 1980, so I have a good track record.
Knowing how to read the polls is one thing, but trends also have to be looked at. I predicted that Bill Clinton would carry the state of Arizona in 1996, the first time for a Democrat since 1948, by looking at the fact that there was no senate or governor's race, but the sitting governor, Fife Symington, was involved in dozens of real estate and business scandals and corruption and was extremely unpopular, following his Republican predecessor, Evan Mecham, who had been impeached and removed. Republicans, disgusted, just didn't turn out in their usual numbers. Those things make a difference.
So Lets Have Some Fun So We Can Watch Something Besides Trump's Corruption on 24 hour Cable News
Outside of unforeseen circumstances, including the daily, "what did Trump do now" broadcasts, the issues that are going to be influential in motivating voters are becoming pretty clear.
1. It's the economy...well...let's just leave it at that!
All of the things that came together to create the perfect storm that allowed Donald Trump to pick up enough electoral votes to get elected President are not lining up this time around. President Biden's infrastructure bill is putting resources into areas where voters switched from Obama to Trump, an odd switch, but caused by frustration over the fact that the jobs weren't coming back in their area. Trump got far too many working class voters in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, because he made a lot of promises to them and acted like he was on their side. Then he turned his back on them to give tax cuts to the rich. So, all three of those states flipped back in 2020, and pretty much held or made more progress during the mid-terms.
President Biden is putting his economic achievements at the front and center of his re-election campaign. Good for him, good for the working class, good for America and good enough to solidify his electability.
2. This Supreme Court's Historic Low Approval will Help President Biden Get Re-elected.
The way the court has finished out this week has, in the opinion of this writer, all but secured the President's re-election. Their rulings this week, especially on affirmative action in college admissions and now, on student loan relief, will be major motivation to get the constituencies that traditionally support Democrats excited about voting and move them to the polls. Independent voters also seem to be disgusted by the far right bias exhibited by the court.
Elections matter, and this is one huge reason why. The political fallout from the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade, hasn't waned, and in fact, as the consequences of that decision have had far reaching effects, it has pushed the President's support among women voters to 58%, according to a recent NBC poll. And a Hollywood script writer couldn't come up with better plots for judicial corruption than the conservative justices who have indulged in gifts from those who have a direct financial interest in their rulings. The only consequence to this ridiculously unethical behavior has been a slap on the wrist, essentially, from Senator Durbin, putting pressure on Roberts to come up with an ethics code.
But the American people have power over the court through the ballot box, and this will be a vote getter for the President. The possibility of President Biden being able to appoint two or three more justices, or even better, the Senate amending the Judiciary Act to add more seats to the court to end its conservative majority, is not as far fetched as we might think. It will be a factor in the 2024 election favoring the President and the Democratic party.
3. Everything Trump.
If the most corrupt, least effective, worst President in American history is on the ballot as the nominee of the Republican party, I believe this is the biggest factor in getting President Biden re-elected. Clear out all the flotsam and factoring used by pollsters to even out their numbers in proportion to what they think, but really don't know, the electorate will look like. President Biden bested Trump by eight million votes nationwide in 2020 and added five states to his electoral vote total that Trump carried in 2016--Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.
Indictments, crimes committed, and a general inability to accept reality, which causes the man to be a pathological liar who can't deal with reality is the guy that President Biden is running against. This is a man who is now refusing to debate the candidates from the other parties because debates expose his lies and cause public criticism which he can't handle. He has painted himself into a corner with a solid base of support among those who have no understanding of how constitutional democracy works, and who have isolated themselves in a media bubble and have absolutely no idea how destructive his Presidency was to this country, and to them personally, nor how much President Biden has achieved since he's been in office.
Indictments for crimes don't just get invented by the Department of Justice on political grounds, not in the United States of America, at least, not until Trump turned the DOJ on its side and made it his personal legal defender. Incompetence doesn't produce success. Trump is clearly past his peak, and while he has convinced some people to support him, mostly those who were already prone to dissatisfaction with government and favorable to a more anarchic, anti-social lifestyle, his four years in office and his antics upon leaving, and since, have brought his unfavorable impression to more than 60% of the electorate, 67% in several of the more credible polls.
From my own observation, I think his base is probably somewhere around 25%, maybe less than that. Yes, he has a big lead among the pitiful cluster of Republicans who have announced intentions to seek the nomination, but even among registered Republicans, he's only hitting at somewhere between 47% and 50%. That's not good enough to win the White House back.
It's Not That These Things Don't Matter, But...
There are a lot of things that used to matter a lot to Americans, but don't seem to get much attention now. I'm appalled at the lack of interest in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yes, that's halfway around the world, and its European politics, former Soviet Union politics, which most Americans have filed away with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its Communist threat. But a Russian oligarchy, armed with nuclear weapons, is more dangerous than the Soviet Union was. Ukraine is fighting for the exact same thing that Americans fought for in 1776, their right to the freedom of self-determination.
The work that President Biden did in re-unifying and re-energizing the NATO alliance was nothing short of a foreign policy miracle. The hope of freedom of all of the world's people lies in the strength of this alliance. In the twentieth century, this achievement alone would have been enough to motivate voters and get the President re-elected. Sadly, while it represents a monumental diplomatic achievement, most Americans yawn and go about their business.
The economic achievements of this President are also monumental. His policies have driven unemployment down a full 8% since taking office two and a half years ago, and it is now holding at the lowest rate achieved since the 1960's. Inflation has been rough, but it was worldwide, and it was worse in most other places in the world than it has been here, and now, it is on the decline, on the timetable that the President said it would be. And that nagging recession that the media has been squawking about for two and a half years is just not materializing. We are seeing private sector job growth like we have not seen it in over 50 years. And the infrastructure bill, which is just now getting things into place, has already earned accolades from Republican Senators Tuberville and Cornyn, even though they voted against the benefits it is providing. I'm sure the President will duly thank these two Republicans for their warm endorsement of his policy.
A majority of Americans are, for the most part, well educated and informed enough to know what is going on, and most don't pay attention to the frivolous idiocy that goes on surrounding the daily appearance of the orange headed buffoon on television for one thing or another. Maybe at some point, the majority of the media will become responsible journalists again, with some sense of morality and ethics as defenders of accountability and democracy instead of purveyors of sensationalism.
But I think that the country's experiment with an anti-government insurrectionist, a hater of law and order and a fraud in every way, including lying about his own wealth, is over. If Trump succeeds in getting the GOP nomination, which I think isn't as certain as the media thinks, and is less than 50-50 at the moment, Joe Biden will be re-elected by a wider margin than he won in 2020. He will carry states that give him at least 343 electoral votes. If the GOP unwisely nominates Desantis, or another Trumpie wannabee, it will be an even bigger victory for Biden.
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