Over the last few weeks, I’ve been everywhere, from Galaxy’s Edge in Disneyland to a domestic oil rig in the plains of Colorado, back and forth to NYC in between. I’ve been asked the same question over and over.
When sharing an Uber with one of America’s most well-known billionaire investors, I was asked. Then, at a recent dinner, I was asked by perhaps the most well-known living television producer just before being seated. The following day, on a flight home, a second-generation school teacher asked me.
“Are you worried about the outcome of the election?”
Given the complete absurdity of the outcome of 2020, I understand their pangs of anxiety. With CoVid providing the cover, crooked Governors & Secretaries of State conspired to unconstitutional means of altering ballot processes. Then they engaged (thanks to Zuckerberg and others) in history's most aggressive harvesting operation. Additionally, states like Michigan printed more ballots than there were residents. And states like Nevada lowered signature matching requirements to zero so that literally a scribble would be legally acceptable to a ballot being cast.
Well, CoVid protocols have been struck down, signature matching is back in place, Zuckboxes are illegal, and many states are taking definitive measures to clean up slop from their voter rolls.
Millions of dead people who were dead in 2020 have now been removed from rolls in dozens of states—many of them swing states. In several states voters lacking proof of citizenship or residency in the state they were registered in have been bounced. In several states, more voters have been expunged from their rolls than the margin of victory in 2020.
In North Carolina, the 2020 margin was less than 200,000; this week, they removed 747,000 “voters.”That’s nearly four times the difference.
But voting integrity action isn’t the only indicator in my mind.
Every person who has asked me about this is almost stunned when I tell them to “believe the polling.”
Not for its accuracy. Polls are still being disproportionately weighted to over-sample left-leaning voters. They are still undercounting independent and Republican participants. So precision isn’t what you are learning from them. But you can take away some perspective with historical comparison.
At this point in the cycles of 2016 and 2020, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden maintained a +6 and +9 advantage, respectively.
In 2016, Clinton lost.
In 2020, Trump became the only sitting President in the modern era to secure more votes than he had received in his first election. Nixon didn’t do it, Reagan didn’t, and Bush, Clinton, and Obama didn’t. And Trump didn’t just get a “few” more votes in 2020; he got 14,000,000 more.
So if Trump was behind by 6 and 9 points in those two cycles, and polls are still being weighted, and he’s sometimes leading and sometimes tied or maybe at most 1 or 2 points behind, read that as a definitively stronger position than he was in 2016 or 2020.
The reasons Trump is leading are numerous. They’ve tried everything from lawfare to assassins (both shooters were financial supporters of the Democrat party and cause), and none of it has worked.
He also stated clear policies that he would implement. Look, when Saturday Night Live opens its season premiere with Maya Rudolph mocking Kamala Harris' vague, meaningless word salads, you know the citizenry sees them, too. Clarity is key, and the voter is getting the most contrasting options to pick from that we’ve seen in American elections.
Trump has expanded his base. He’s doing significantly better with suburban moms, African Americans, Latinos, and voters under 35. She leads in some categories but nowhere near the levels that Clinton and Biden did.
Trump is winning. But don’t tell anyone. Just be quietly determined to take ten people to the polls this year.
The night of November 5th will be here soon enough!
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