CAMPAIGN: Over the weekend, we checked on the polls!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2024

Also, we listened to voters: Over the weekend, a thought came to mind:

It had been a bit of a while since we'd looked in on the polls.

We were thinking, of course, of the Biden-Trump polls—the polls of November's presumptive election. We went to 538.com and we checked. 

What we saw didn't make us happy. Ipsos/Reuters had been in the field. One additional click of the mouse sped us to this report:

Most Americans are dissatisfied with their choices for president

Washington DC, January 25, 2024—New Reuters/Ipsos polling finds that Americans are dissatisfied with their choices for president. Most feel that Donald Trump (56%) and Joe Biden (70%) should not run for president again in 2024. 

[...]

When asked who they would vote for if the presidential election were held today, two in five Americans (40%) choose Trump, while about one in three (34%) pick Biden. The rest either say some other candidate (7%), they wouldn’t vote (11%), or they don’t know (8%).

In theory, there's a very long way to go—and, in various ways, this is going to be an election year without any serious precedent. But as we scrolled through the list of surveys at 538, it was true:

Candidate Donald J. Trump was ahead pretty much every time. 

You hear them saying that on Fox. When they say that, their statements are accurate.

We did something else this weekend; we heard America singing! We sat and watched C-Span's Washington Journal as neighbors and friends phoned in.

Sandburg knew the American people. So did Abraham Lincoln. On Sunday morning, callers were asked to comment on the role the economy was likely to play as they decided their vote. 

At 7:17 a.m., C-Span's moderator threw to Matthew in Somerset, Ohio. He was calling on the Independent line. This is what he said:

MATTHEW IN OHIO (1/28/24): I think my vote is probably going to be affected by the economy because I'm a small businessperson, I work for myself, and I kind of rely on new work coming in, and I don't see a lot of it. And the price of expenses to get stuff done, it's been tough. And let alone just going to the grocery store.

But I am probably going to vote for whoever will be the Republican. I'm just not impressed with Joe Biden. I voted for him before, but I think I am changing my mind.

MODERATOR: I know you said you're probably going to vote for whoever is the Republican nominee. Right now, the two main Republican candidates are former president Trump and former ambassador Nikki Haley. Do you have a preference between the two of them who you would like to see become the nominee?

MATTHEW IN OHIO: Who I would like to see, I would really like to see Nikki Haley. I really would like to vote for a female for president, you know just to say I was part of it. Besides, I think I like and respect her. I think she is pretty steady and smart on her feet. She is not too abrasive, and that is important.

MODERATOR: All right, Matthew. Appreciate your call this morning.

Sometimes the callers do sound like the stereotypes. But sometimes, the callers just don't.

Around 7:30 a.m., Wanda from Indiana made a similar call, once again on the Independent line. She praised certain actions by Biden, trashed Trump very hard. When asked for her choice, she said this:

WANDA FROM INDIANA: I love Nikki Haley. I would give anything for them to give her a chance...I would support her over Biden, yes.

We'll be voting for Biden ourselves. But so it goes when neighbors and friends report their various outlooks. 

(Full disclosure: Ohio and Indiana aren't likely to be "in play" this year.)

Can President Biden stage a campaign which will start rolling back current numbers? We have no way of knowing.

That said, we the blue voters will play a role in the way the blue nominee is perceived. We've been playing that role for the past sixty years, and our input hasn't always been helpful.

Meanwhile, alas! Under recent arrangements, the electoral college system has tended to favor the GOP. That explains why Candidates Gore (2000) and Hillary Clinton (2016) won the nationwide popular vote, but their opponents ended up in the White House.

It also explains why Candidate Biden (2020) won the popular vote by 7.1 million votes—by 4.5 percentage points—but could have seen victory slip away if a relative handful of voters, in a few select states, had voted the other way.

At the New York Times, Nate Cohn thinks this advantage to the GOP is being eroded by certain demographic changes. We have no idea if that will turn out to be right.

But as we looked at that Ipsos survey, the president was behind by five points—and he might need to win nationwide by as much as four points in order to get re-elected.

It's time for our tribe to stop clowning around and try to discover the way to win this upcoming election. On the front page of today's New York Times, Reid Epstein and three other reporters outline their understanding of the current plan:

Inside Biden’s Anti-Trump Battle Plan (and Where Taylor Swift Fits In)

As former President Donald J. Trump speeds toward the Republican nomination, President Biden is moving quickly to pump energy into his re-election bid, kicking off what is likely to be an ugly, dispiriting and historically long slog to November between two unpopular nominees.

After months of languid buildup in which he held only a single public campaign event, Mr. Biden has thrown a series of rallies across battleground states, warning that democracy itself is at stake in 2024.

He sent two of his most trusted White House operatives to take the helm of his re-election campaign in Wilmington, Del., after Mr. Trump seized control of the Republican primary race more rapidly than Mr. Biden’s advisers had initially expected.

And other Biden aides are drafting wish lists of potential surrogates, including elected officials, social media influencers and the endorsement of their wildest dreams: the global superstar Taylor Swift.

[...]

“It’s game on, the beginning of the general election,” said Representative Ann McLane Kuster of New Hampshire, the chair of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of 97 centrist House Democrats. “We’ve got to win this.”

We’ve got to win this, Rep. Kuster said. Indeed, President Biden has been warning that democracy itself is at stake.

We've been saying such things for the past several years. At this point, are we prepared to stop the cable news clowning? Are we prepared to rise up on our haunches and fight? 

After all these years of self-indulgence, are we sure we know how to do that?

It may be too late to win this year. Then again, that gloomy prognosis may turn out to be totally wrong.

But many members of the blue team have sleepwalking into this difficult time, and tens of millions of voters around the country may not automatically be inclined to see every issue our way.

On Fox, the growing collection of jugglers and clowns—the wrestlers, comedians and very slow boys— are broadcasting powerful messages—and there's nothing so stupid that they won't be eager to say it. Once again, here are the idiots Watters and Gutfeld, endlessly pimping the possibility that Biden will be replaced as the Democratic nominee:

WATTERS (1/26/24): It's got to be Newsome. He's not a surrogate, he's the back-up quarterback...

GUTFELD: How about Michelle [Obama]? Have you seen her arm? 

WATTERS: Arms! [PRETENDING TO FLEX] She's been working out!

[Naughty boys laugh together] 

On Fox, it's an evergreen. When you run out of things to say, you bring up the scary theory that Michelle Obama will be the Democratic nominee. 

In this case, the dullest little boys in the nation enjoyed their misogyny-adjacent dull-witted humor, laughing about the way the former first lady's arms are simply too strong and too big.

This is who and what these corporate tool boys are. Also, this is the new message delivery system being instituted at Fox—and let it be said that the people at Fox have some very strong cars they are aggressively playing.

The southern border is very strong, and they never stop talking about the way President Biden is inclined to poop in his pants. As these twin idiots clown in this way, our more regal mainstream news organizations politely avert their gaze.

This degradation of the public discourse has been underway forever. In substantial measure, it motored ahead in the 1990s, within the blue tribe upper-end press.

On Fox, people like Dana Perino sit by and watch while these underdeveloped lost boys clown and joke and play, thus proving the fact that people of higher mental caliber and greater experience will often do what it takes to retain those high-paying jobs.

This is the actual lay of the land as this fateful campaign gets its start. We'll have much more to show you about this devolving, braindead culture at Fox—and you can be sure that you'll hear nothing about it from your friends at the New York Times. It's been normalized, baked into the system.

Two callers to C-Span weren't thrilled about Trump. They weren't thrilled about Joe Biden either.

Their respective states won't be in play. Such as we were or such as we would become, we thought we heard America singing that day.

This afternoon: The economy, if you can keep it