Good News: September 2024 Edition

Gods, I feel like a negative nabob half the time. So let's try some good news.

I may not trust the polls but the late September numbers keep favoring Kamala Harris for the presidency over donald "34 count felon" trump.

Harris leads over trump in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Again, polls don't vote, voters do: So get the damn vote out Democrats.

Just a reminder that the mainstream media polling services - due to billionaire owners or their own craven needs - skew too much rural and conservative, meaning the pro-Kamala numbers should be even more in her favor (and that the tight races in other battleground states aren't really favoring trump).

The polling, for example, shows a tighter race in Alaska for Harris and Democrats than the past 30 years. Harris' numbers in Nebraska - where the shared Electoral College results by congressional district established a single EV dot in a Red State - are strong enough that the Republican Party is trying to pressure the state legislature to undo the shared Electoral and go Winner-Take-All. But there's signs Harris - thanks to her VP ally Tim Walz, who's from Nebraska - could flip the whole state Blue. Again, get the voters out to vote this November, Democrats. (Psst: Fight for EVERY state - well okay maybe not West Virginia, that's a lost cause - just to keep trump from clearing the Electoral College hurdle!)

Thanks to Richardson's escalating scandals, there's a growing chance Harris - and the whole Democratic ticket - can clinch North Carolina. If that happens alongside Harris reclaiming the battleground states Biden won in 2020, there is no way trump and his lackeys can stop the count and claim "they stole the election".

Even trump's schemes to undo the results are going to hit a wall: the Electoral Count and Presidential Transition Act of 2022. That cleaned up a number of loopholes and grey areas at the state level about challenging election results, and required election certifications done certain ways to minimize partisan sabotage. Granted, trump's legal team are going to test that law and insist on undermining the vote counts in key states/counties, but considering how their lack of evidence undercut their efforts in 2020 will be the same this 2024, it's doubtful he and his lawyers will prevail (the one negative thing to consider: That the trump-loving Supreme Court will break the entire Constitution in his favor when his legal battles reach their bench).

A Presidential win for Harris/Walz won't be enough: which is why the signs of a 2024 Blue Wave affecting the Congressional/Senate races provide a positive buzz. Again, voter turnout matters.

The encouraging news on that front: Democratic voter enthusiasm is increasing this 2024.

Voter turnout remains key, America. Republican efforts at voter suppression can't stop that, no matter how hard they try. If we can get the turnout for Kamala over 81 million - Biden's record - trump and the Republicans can't overcome that.

All this good news comes with that call to action: Get the damn vote out.

Get to work, America.

The Portents of September 2024

So heading into September of this year of election, everything turns into a horse race and every poll gets parsed for omens and portents like the days of Rome (mmm, Rome).

I've gotten out of favor with the constant, obsessive polling that's been going on since at least 2012. While the polling then worked out and proved itself, afterwards the Republicans and the Far Right have figured out how to skew the numbers to where the last couple of election cycles weren't as easily predicted. We're at the point where the polling services are intentionally skewing their populations more rural - and conservative - to where you can't trust them.

Thing is, as the election itself draws nearer, the pollsters do shift their habits to better reflect the two demographics they pursue: Likely Voters and Registered Voters. So at this point, the polling gets to be a little more accurate, although we need to take all of it with a grain of salt (just like the Romans used salt for everyt... ow stop hitting me).

So while we can't take polls for granted this September, looking at results like this from Bloomberg/Morning Consult at least will give us Harris/Walz supporters a good reason to wake up every morning and campaign for voter turnout.

Or as Taniel tweets (STOP CALLING IT X, ELON) keeping track of the Electoral College: 

New Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls (RVs here):

Wisconsin: Harris 52/44
Pennsylvania: Harris 51/47
Nevada: Harris 49/45
Michigan: Harris 49/46
[that's 270+]
Georgia: Harris 49/47
North Carolina: Harris 49/47
Arizona: 48/48

— Taniel (@Taniel) August 29, 2024

Considering what we consider a "battleground state" is something within 1-2 points, to have Wisconsin going for Harris well above "margin of error" should make that state a solid Blue.

Here's where it's good news: Wisconsin is one of the states trump was planning on sowing chaos to prevent an Electoral College count from even happening. If it's too big of a blowout, even trump's cries of "stollen votes" won't be believable.

The growing margins for Harris in places like Michigan and Nevada help solidify the likelihood trump and his lackeys can't deny the Electoral College results. Granted, trump will do everything to prevent Georgia or Arizona getting called - especially with the Georgia Elections Board setting up new rules that would allow for massive tampering by Republicans - but if all the other battleground states go Democratic, the mixed party leadership in those states make it harder to rig the results. As soon as Harris/Walz cross that 270 finish line, trump's whole stunt to throw the results to the House of Representatives becomes moot.

What the map looks like based on the Bloomberg poll.
We can try and flip more states Blue, by the way...

This is the map trump wants, unless Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada
flip Red to him, in which case we're fucked.

It'll then be an issue of both houses of Congress certifying the Electoral results, and unless Republicans control both next January there's every likelihood enough rational members of the GOP will certify Harris' win.

So that's one of the other things we need to consider this September: It's NOT JUST THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE ON THE LINE.

Democrats and Left-leaning Independent voters need to understand that voting for every Democratic candidate for the Senate and the House matter as well. To truly ensure trump can't steal his way back into the White House, there needs to be an Honest-to-God Blue Wave for 2024 covering all 50 states and covering every elected office on the ballot.

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT, EVERYBODY.

And for the Love of God and Country and Mom and Apple Pie and college football - I blame UF's loss on Ben Sasse's scandals by the by - vote Blue, America.

The Blind Eye of the Beltway

Update: Thank you Steve in Manhattan for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! I hope everyone browses the other articles here and gains enlightenment in some form. Also, why the hell didn't Barbie win for Best Set Design?! I mean, they used ALL that pink...! 

One of the reasons for my apprehension about this 2024 presidential cycle is how the mainstream media - the Beltway (Washington) punditry leading the Fourth Estate that overwhelms our awareness - is mishandling the entire thing as a personality horse race: Between an elderly Democratic white guy the Beltway is deeming too old, and an enraged bullying Republican white guy (who's not that much older, and showing more signs of dementia) facing criminal charges across four different court rooms threatening to impose a dictatorship on Day One.

Try to guess which issue the esteemed Beltway expresses a more pressing concern. /headdesk

And try to remember how this all feels so similar to how that Beltway - now older, but still operating with the same hive-mind "Both Sideism" world view - mishandled the 2016 presidential cycle, which proved disastrous. I wrote back in 2017 how the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review evaluated the media's performance and found it biased - obscenely so - towards donald trump and against Hillary Clinton:

In other words, the mainstream media - the Beltway pundits that dominate the political discourse - flipped the real world. They focused more on Hillary's "scandals" - which turned out to be nothingburgers, inflated to inflame the voters against her - than on her policy positions to where I guarantee the average voter didn't even know what her policies were. They focused on trump's "policies" - which was BUILD A WALL, Start a TRADE WAR with China, and Shut Down NATO - while ignoring trump's failures, financial scandals, and sexual assaults.

In short: Hillary got all the bad press, trump got all the good press.

We're seeing it happen again, especially in the national press like the New York Times and Washington Post (not to mention the 24-hour cable punditry like Fox Not-News (obviously), CNN, and yes even liberal-leaning MSNBC). Most of that mainstream media focusing on narratives over Biden "needing to step aside for a younger more winnable Democrat" even as the early primary results have Biden body-slamming his opponents by 80-90 percent. Most of that same mainstream media ignoring donald trump's open calls to put immigrants into internment camps, to destroy NATO as a bulwark against Russia, to operate as a dictator on Day One "to punish" his enemies; even ignoring the recent reports of how trump's White House staff was pumping themselves full of drugs as a dangerous abuse of power.

It's that disconnect - especially at the Paper Of Record the New York Times - that is leaving our whole nation vulnerable to disinformation, misplaced outrage, and misled voters. It's the kind of thing enraging the likes of Lucian K. Truscott IV (a long-tenured reporter and pundit himself) over at Salon:

Two things — check that, three things — appear to have gone off the rails at the paper we used to call the Gray Lady. First, whoever is in charge of the paper’s polls is not doing their job. Second, whoever is choosing what to emphasize in Times coverage of the campaign for the presidency is showing bias. Third, the Times is obsessed with Joe Biden’s age at the same time they’re leaving evidence of Donald Trump’s mental and verbal stumbles completely out of the news.

Let’s start right there. At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent. “You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today.” You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend. You’ll have to read other publications — for example, Salon or maybe the Guardian — if you want to learn how often Trump is losing his way mid-sentence at rallies and just mumbling incoherently.

The Times on Sunday, however, had this headline ready for your morning coffee: “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to be Effective.” It’s another grab from the New York Times/Siena College poll they published on Saturday that is so outrageously flawed, a cottage industry has sprung up to pick apart its methodology and point out its glaring contradictions and straight-up bias.

A favorite of poll skeptics is its sampling bias. How did the New York Times come up with a polling sample that included 36 percent rural voters when the 2020 proportion of rural voters was 19 percent? Somehow, the poll’s sample of female voters was equally skewed. The poll found Trump winning the female vote by one percent, when Biden carried women in 2020 by 11 points. The Times wants you to ignore that in between, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court justices quarterbacked the Dobbs decision overturning women’s constitutional right to abortion, followed almost immediately by states banning abortion all over the country, many with no exceptions for rape or incest. The Times doesn’t say how it squares its poll numbers with the fact that women turned out in huge numbers to help win referendums confirming a right to abortion, including in such Republican strongholds as Kansas and Kentucky, and handed every special election to Democratic candidates in the bargain. They just want you to believe there’s been a 12-point swing toward Trump among women, with no evidence except, poof!  It happened!...

Why is the New York Times missing the red flags in its own polls? More important, why has the paper decided to give its own deeply biased poll results such heavy play? I don’t want to bring up but her emails, but for crying out loud, why is the New York Times so clearly making the same mistakes of bias and emphasis they made in 2016 covering Hillary Clinton all over again?... None of the daily drumbeat of manufactured “news” added up to even a pinprick of a scandal, but as the Times did with Whitewater and the rest of the made-up Clinton scandals, the paper simply couldn’t resist filling its front page with negative stories about the Democratic candidate for president...

If I could answer from my spot on the sidelines, there are several overlapping reasons why the Times - and the Post, and CNN, and everybody else with a free pass to the green rooms of every talking head show out there - are making the same mistakes they made in 2016.

One of the most obvious reasons the mainstream media behaves this way is the "horse race mentality" that a political campaign brings to the public's attention. It's the simplest way to frame and cover an election - This Guy vs. That Guy, let's see who wins! - even at the expense of the practical issues. The media wants this to be a personality contest.

But part of the problem is how the media frames this personality contest with a mindset of "Both Sideism" - that both candidates AND the two major parties they represent have to be balanced in some way - to where they will enlarge or over-report any minor issue for one candidate/party - to the point of fabricating scandal where there is no scandal - in order to balance the open and major flaws of the opponent. We're seeing it now where the Beltway elites are whining over the "scandal" of Biden being "too old" (when he's only three years older, and shows signs of being more fit than trump) while papering over the reality that trump is facing up to 91 felony charges in four different court rooms.

This is, by the by, why the House Republicans are still so desperate to dig up dirt on Biden's family: Fresh red meat to feed to a media corps hungry for "Both Sides" scandal reporting.

A less obvious reason the punditry are acting this way is due to their own world views getting shaped during the Reagan Era of "Sunny Conservative" Born Again Americanism. Much like the punditry and journalism of the Sixties and Seventies shaped by those who grew up to the FDR New Deal experience, today's punditry and media leadership came of age in the Eighties and Nineties, which shapes their bias of today. I said this before: 

What we're getting is this ongoing fantasy, this wish fulfillment, among the Far Right pols and pundits desirous for The Return Of The Reagan Heir: the Prince That Was Promised. We're talking about a set of people pining for the days when it was 1985: when Reagan stomped the hell out of Mondale and his dirty hippie librul army of Electoral College no-shows...

Far too many pundits and reporters view modern Democrats as "out of touch" of the "mainstream" American thought, which the media thinks means "Rural" "White" and "Angry". This is the reason why the Times/Siena College polling skewed their sample population 36 percent Rural instead of making it 19 percent like the 2020 vote turnout confirmed. The national media EXPECTS this to be fact when instead its their own bias showing.

This is why the mainstream media keeps wishcasting - thank you, Tom Nichols - for The Next Reagan: this charming, wistful, flag-waving pie-loving patron for that Small-Town America where neighbors knew everybody well enough to leave folding chairs along the 4th of July parade route down Broadway Avenue the day before, because they trust each other enough that nobody will go stealing them.

The media elites kind of know that donald trump cannot be the Reagan figure, he doesn't come from that America - he and his will happily steal or vandalize those folding chairs, and then blame it on immigrants - but the pundits still can't wrap their heads around the possibility that Biden and the Democrats can represent that part of America alongside the 4th of July parade routes down MLK Boulevard in Los Angeles and Chicago and Tampa and San Antonio and Cleveland and every other major metro where most Americans actually reside.

So they chide the Democratic front-runners for not fulfilling their Reaganesque fantasy - even as Biden, as I've noted before, is as close a Reagan (Passive-Positive) figure the Democrats have to lead the nation - all the while promoting less-charismatic Republicans - stop making Rubio happen, he's not going to happen! - or worse providing cover for Republicans representing the racism, sexism, greed and violence of America's darker Id - at the expense of the American voters remaining misinformed and disillusioned.

I'm finishing this up just as the Super Tuesday voting is wrapping up. Both Biden and trump won enough states and delegates to effectively wrap up their respective nominations, but with noticeable differences. Biden - again - curb-stomped his primary opponent Dean Phillips to where in most states Phillips was in third place behind "Uncommitted" (which also tended to be in single digits). trump actually lost a state - Vermont - to opponent Nikki Haley; and while he dominated in several states in most others Haley had secured around 30 percent, which is a significant portion of party voters.

Biden is winning big as an incumbent candidate for the Democrats, while trump is struggling as the incumbent candidate for the Republicans.

And yet you'll never see the Beltway Media frame The Narrative of their horse race in that manner.

The pundits just can't see it that way.

Praying to a Just And Loving Unitarian Goddess for a Sane November 2020 General Election

I can mess around with 270towin maps all day long...

I can stare at the polling maps by the professionals showing good numbers for Joe Biden...

what FiveThirtyEight is projecting this Halloween night, 3 nights out

I can craft 100 different maps of what I hope to see Wednesday morning with a big contented smile on my face:

I'm hoping for a NC/GA/FL/TX flip to help break the Southern Strategy forever...

But I can't rely or wait on hope and neither should you. The Early Voting turnout so far gives me great hope that a large Blue Wave vote is coming... But there's an entire Republican Party from trump down to his hand-picked Far Right judges down to the county-level supervisors and questionable law enforcement looking to get in the way of a clean vote by the American people.

Get the vote out, Democrats. To every Independent Voter out there, this is the year - we need it, to escape the damage trump's mismanagement is inflicting on us right now - you NEED to vote Blue across the board. To every Republican Voter... for the love of God wake up and stop supporting those crooks. Please.

What If: Think Of the Future Heading Into Bidenworld

(Update 12/27: Many thanks again to Batocchio for promoting this blog through both Crooks&Liars as well as his Vagabond Scholar site, where he hosts the annual Jon Swift Memorial Annual Roundup. Happy New Year to you all!)

I have my concerns about polling, I know the numbers may look good but they're not the actual voting that has to take place on November 3 (and I should be working on my Florida Ballot coverage this weekend because Early Voting is in ONE week).

But damn, the current numbers for Joe Biden beating the tar out of trump (now in double-digits!) are so enticing to look at.

From FiveThirtyEight.com on October 9 2020

And if we go by 538's state-by-state projections, we're looking at this for the November results:

Now 538 is not exact, nobody can predict the future, anything can happen in the next three weeks, etc. But the trends do not favor trump, all the trends are favoring Biden. So we gotta start thinking about what the world is going to look like the day after November 3, 2020.

For starters, it's going to be as chaotic as hell.

We've known for months now that trump will attempt to subvert, block, and deny the vote-counting in key battleground states to throw their Electoral College votes into a bind. He's primarily looking to do that by claiming massive voter fraud through the mail-in ballots, even without evidence that such fraud can happen (hint, it doesn't). 

The point of this would be to convince the state legislatures in those states - especially the ones controlled by Republicans - to nullify the popular vote and substitute their Electors instead. And if they can't do that, have the legislatures deny any Electors at all to where nobody clears the 270 EV needed to win. And when the Democratic Party sues in those states to count the votes, force the lawsuits up to a Supreme Court packed with eager Republican justices willing to throw the election in favor of trump (this is coming from trump himself). And even if that all doesn't work out, as long as they can prevent Biden getting over the 270 hurdle they can force the election to the House of Representatives where the GOP hopes to control enough DELEGATES (each state gets one vote, not each Representative) to give trump the "win" anyway.

The good news is, this isn't all guaranteed to go trump's way. There are not a lot of states in play that trump can obstruct/deny the popular vote against him: right now that would be Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, maybe Wisconsin, Arizona. and/or Pennsylvania. If Georgia's popular vote goes against trump, then throw them into the mix. But that's a lot of states at play, and trump would have to steal all of them to pull his con game off.

trump would have to ensure the state legislatures play the game to his/their advantage. Problem is, not everybody votes a straight party ticket down the entire ballot. Not everyone voting against trump will also vote against the local Republican candidates on the ticket. So if they try to go out of their way to toss anti-trump votes as invalid, the local Representatives run the risk of tossing votes THEY need. So they may not be positioned to do that for trump. Those local Representatives also have to live with the consequences of denying the voters their say. If the state legislature refuses to certify a Biden victory where a clear majority - say Biden wins Georgia with 51 percent to trump's 44, a six-point difference - is in place, there is going to be a lot of outrage and anger. All the police curfews and beat-downs in the world would not be enough to curtail the non-stop protests that would overwhelm the state capitals from that point on.

So trump's game can only work if the votes are too close to call, or within margin of error to where people can't be expected to protest (although the rage will be there, trust me). Which is where the voter turnout is a must for Democrats: And there's a lot of evidence the turnout for 2020 is going to be 8 to 15 percent higher than 2016. And if the turnout is similar to the midterms in 2018, it benefits the Democratic Party, meaning good news for Biden.

So say we get past November 3 with Biden getting clear majority leads in most Blue and battleground states to where trump can't claim victory (he'll try, but nobody but his rabid base will believe him). Say we go through November and December with trump trying all the legal - and illegal - stunts he and his cronies can think of (and some of the illegal things trump could try would throw the country into immediate civil war. My God, people war-gamed this shit so thoroughly there's a Wiki page for it!). We get through all of that and Biden still gets about 52-54 percent of the popular and 352 Electoral Votes, clearly winning the Presidency.

trump and other Republicans and especially a lot in the Far Right media still will never accept it.

That's where the next worry begins: What trump would do to burn everything down as he exits the Oval Office.

If trump and the Republicans can't rule - by minority power - they will certainly try to ruin, from petty acts of sabotage through intentional destruction of documents and evidence to hide any criminal mischief that happened in trump's administration. trump is facing and will face lawsuits and criminal charges the second that Presidential Immunity no longer applies to him, and he and his handlers will try to destroy every piece of evidence they can - however they can get the Justice Department to clean up for him - to avoid a slam dunk case against him.

trump will definitely do everything in his power to ruin the economy however he can, through massive increase of his tariffs that we've already seen cause damage to our own. He could well attempt Executive Orders to gut things like Social Security and Medicare in ways that would take months for a Biden administration to repair.

I even dread some of the worst things trump could do as he gets pushed out the door: Create chaos on the international stage by violating our treaties, shredding diplomatic norms he hasn't yet touched, and probably even trigger a war or two - likely Iran, if you watch what Pompeo is doing - that could tie up Biden for weeks after the inauguration.

(Also: I dunno if anybody else has been talking about it, but one thing trump could do if forced out of office would be to remove the United States from NATO. It would be a boon to trump's idol Putin, it would cause massive foreign policy chaos here at home, and if he pulls it off - depending on the circumstances with the Senate - there might not be a way for Biden to rejoin that alliance)

(Also Also: One of the worst things I can imagine trump doing if he's forced out is literally burning everything down as he leaves. I'm talking arson from the White House to every other government building he could bust out. I have had honest-to-God nightmares since January 2020, the ones I can remember waking up from going "Shit, he WOULD do that wouldn't he, like the mob boss he is...")

And none of that is covering the most likely response to a Biden victory: the likelihood trump will call on his White Supremacist foot soldiers to "Stand Up" and go on bloody warpaths. Those wingnuts are triggered and ready to roll, some of them are already jumping the gun.

Still, with all the chaos we're facing, we need to consider the possibility Biden will win the Presidency. What will he face as he takes the Oath of Office in 2021?

We already know the crises facing this nation: A pandemic that needs curtailing and curing; A healthcare system still in need of upgrade and protection from Far Right lawsuits trying to gut what we already have; A growing climate change disaster in need of immediate attention; Massive federal budget deficits based mostly on reckless Republican tax cuts for the super-rich; Genuine infrastructure projects; The need for better wages for part-time and full-time workers; A housing crisis alongside a returning banking crisis that threatens to echo the damage done in 2007-08. There's a lot of shit to handle.

And any response from Biden to all that depends on if Democrats have control of BOTH Houses of Congress. The U.S. House is currently Democratic - and there is no sign, even WITH trump's threats to cheat, that the Republicans can claim the House - but the Senate is currently Republican and under the control of "Moscow" Mitch McConnell. Currently, the odds favor the Democrats flipping about five states - Maine, Colorado, Arizona, maybe Iowa, maybe Montana - while the Republicans have a shot at one - maybe Alabama - meaning the Democrats could win the Senate 51-49 (there could be Democratic wins in South Carolina (!), Texas (!), maybe one seat in Georgia (!), and maybe Mississippi (!!!), so there's a lot at play here).

However, if the Republicans retain control of the Senate (and McConnell stays as Majority Leader), you can forget about anything Biden could try to implement. McConnell is a master obstructionist, having denied Obama most of Obama's agenda in order to keep Republican minority rule intact from 2009 onward. McConnell will be in position to block any attempts to repair the damage trump has done to the political landscape, and McConnell will definitely do everything in his power to stop Biden from realigning the judicial system that McConnell has spent the last four years filling with Federalist Society, Far Right judges.

Remember how McConnell denied Obama the right to nominate Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left by Scalia's death claiming it was an election year (and please note the hypocrisy when Mitch rushed to fill the vacancy for Ginsburg's seat while the seat was still warm)? If he's still Majority Leader in 2021, we can expect McConnell to deny Biden his right to nominate ANYONE to any Senate-approved position (please note, the GOP threatened to do that to Hillary). McConnell could prevent Biden from filling Cabinet positions needed to oversee rebuilding of agencies either raided by trump and his cronies or agencies left to rot by those cronies' mismanagement. It would fulfill the Republican dogma of "Government is BAD" by keeping the Executive branch understaffed, unmanaged, unable to serve the public trust.

One can hope that Biden - with the zeal of bipartisanship he carries with him - could appeal to his colleagues in the Senate to allow him at least the right to staff the Executive Branch as he needs. But Biden needs to remember he has to give his own Democratic Party the chance to fill those roles to ensure a Progressive-leaning agenda in the first place (If Biden caves to McConnell and fills too many administrative and judicial positions with Republican-leaning centrists, the Democrats will implode).

A better future path to Bidenworld would require not only Biden winning the Electoral College, but also entering into 2021 with a Democratic majority in Congress (with the likelihood any McConnell/GOP attempt to gridlock the Senate with Cloture/Filibustering negated with removal of the Filibuster rules).

That would usher in a quick period of action: Democrats taking care of the immediate crises - fixing the nation's pandemic response and overseeing a healthy win against COVID-19 - and setting up the agendas they have to get the economy regaining jobs at better wages, fighting climate change, et al.

The thing about a Biden Presidency all depends on how his Passive-Positive Congenial nature will engage with the needs of the Democratic Party as well as the needs of the United States. One of the boons of Passive-Positives is the open way they approach their job: Appeals to friendship, appeals to shared values, an overall appeal to our better angels. In a way, Pass-Positives are great at building and maintaining "The Big Tent" where a multitude of party factions can gel and get along.

Whether this means the Passive-Positive temperament will lead to effective leadership choices depends on how Biden handles the immediacy of the crises confronting him. One thing he has already done is absorb the agendas and plans of other Democratic figures - Warren's bold ideas, Harris' incentive to work hard towards reforms - that can well carry into his administration. Much in the way that Reagan entered his Presidency to fulfill some of the ambitions of the Goldwater/Far Right conservatism of the Republican Party (Reagan's malleable leadership ended up curtailing some of that Far Right agenda, you'd be amazed how many Far Right pundits curse Reagan's name today), Biden could enter his administration seeking to fulfill some of the ambitions of the Far Left progressivism (especially on climate change and employment/wages). 

There's still a lot of factors at play. There's still too much risk out there regarding trump's efforts to sabotage the election this November.

We can war-game out 2020 as much as we want. But what we really need to do is commit to the one act we CAN commit: VOTE. We need to vote and vote Democratic across the board, we need to get the vote out for the 2020 Blue Wave. We need to send trump out the door and into a New York State criminal docket. We need to vote for every Democratic candidate for the Senate to kick McConnell out of power and into the deepest pit of Hell he deserves.

Vote for your lives, America, this 2020. And for the LOVE OF GOD, VOTE BIDEN. For the LOVE OF YOUR FAMILIES AND GRANDPARENTS AND CHILDREN, Don't vote for trump or McConnell or for any Republican misrule.

The Game of Demographics 2020 Season

What has trump and the Republicans so terrified about 2020 to where they are threatening to disqualify entire ballots across battleground states?

Because it still all comes down to the Electoral College, and too many large-sized battleground states are basically toss-ups in the polling. Especially the large-sized states that leaned Red for the last 20-40 years.

It's telling that for 2020, the biggest states that went for trump - Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina - are either reliably Blue for Biden now or technically within margin of error (say, 3 percent) of going either way. There are good chances that Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan are going for Biden. Pennsylvania could go Blue but there are signs it's one of the states trump is trying to trash hundreds of thousands of ballots. The polling on Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida keep fluctuating. 

Also, trump's attempts to flip Minnesota do not seem to be going anywhere at the moment (Biden has a +10 lead on trump as of 9/24).

If we just count the states with double-digit Electoral Votes, and only count the ones we pretty much know are going for Biden or for trump, the map looks like this:

It used to be that the Republicans - the party of conservatism - had claimed Texas as theirs since the 1980s, along with strong holds on North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida all as part of their grand Southern Strategy. That was also true of Ohio and Arizona, both as part of Ohio as a centerpiece of traditional Republican origins and Arizona as part of the western conservative movement that held sway in California.

But a lot had been changing, especially by 2008 when it became clear that a demographic shift was happening, coinciding with a collapse in Republican dominance due to mismanagement, corruption, and foolishness under the Dubya regime. Florida, due to its ethnic and economic diversity, was no longer reliably Republican at the national level (going for Clinton twice in the 90s and for Obama twice in the 2010s). Virginia's cultural conservatism lost its grip and the state is pretty much Democratic Blue since 2010, and that shift is starting to drift into North Carolina.

What's shocking is the shift in voter turnout in once-reliably Red states like Texas, Arizona, and Georgia. These were cornerstones of Republican dominance, and yet they're now close enough to flipping Blue that Democrats are noticeably campaigning in them where they once avoided wasting any previous efforts in them.

For all the gerrymandering, voter suppression, and gamesmanship, the Republicans are losing to a generational shift away from Boomers (aging Far Right who are dying out) and Gen Xers (half -divided between Reagan worshipping believers to jaded Dem centrists) to Millennials and Aughts (rising in age to vote, and vote more aggressively than Gen X) who are more Progressive, burned out by failed Republican agendas (more of them are poor and in debt in larger numbers than previous generations at their age, and a lot of that due to Republican policies), and ethnically-mixed.

Also in the mix is the unintended consequences of California's housing crisis of the last ten years: where California had become a jobs Mecca drawing many young adults (mostly liberal-leaning) to the state in the 1990s and 2000s, the insane cost-of-living and overvalued house properties - mostly due to the conservative Prop 13's tax-limiting requirements to keep values overinflated - have driven Cali residents elsewhere... to places like Arizona and Texas. And those ex-Californians did not shift their political views when they moved, meaning they are shifting those states further Left than ever before.

Losing Texas in the Electoral College at the least would be catastrophic for Republicans: Where Democrats can rely on California, New York and Illinois to provide a foundation for Electoral success, Texas was the big one for the GOP. Florida may be almost as big on the counts, but unreliable. Ohio had been that way for both Obama elections. The next largest populated state that Republicans could rely on when (not if) Texas goes Blue would be Tennessee at 11 Electoral Votes. Just look at the battleground map above: If Texas can't be counted on, Republicans are starting with a guaranteed 32 EV compared to Democrats' 174. And there aren't enough small state Electoral Votes to catch up.

Combined with the noted shift in suburban voting habits, states like Florida and Ohio and Texas and Georgia and North Carolina - where most of their largest metros are suburban landscapes - are now honestly up for grabs for the Democrats to win or lose, not the Republicans. Granted, the Republicans can try again to gerrymander those states even more to retain control of their state legislatures and congressional delegations, but they are running out of room and running out of time.

This was a demographic shift expected to kick in by 2040 at the latest, 2028 by the earliest (I had hoped in 2016 that it was sooner than that, ah well). trump's toxicity with suburban families (women in particular) is accelerating the shift.

This explains the openness of trump's war against the voting methods like mail-in balloting, and his blatant call to dismiss ballots and delegitimize the results in the battleground states. This is desperation, not just for him but for the Republican Party as a whole. They can't solidify the corruption of their minority rule without a second trump term to complete the destruction of federal norms.

This is why it's so important for Democratic voter turnout in the states, especially the battleground states. Everything is at stake this 2020 cycle. The fate of state legislatures, Senate seats, census-based redistricting, everything.

Republicans may have the money and the guns, but Democrats have the numbers. And the future. They can win the future this November.

The Numbers That Matter 2020 Edition

If anything keeps me hopeful, it's this: In the 2020 Election cycle trump honestly cannot win.

Some of the things to consider:

trump has done nothing to appeal to a broad range of American voters. Any administrative successes he's had revolve around unpopular actions - a massive tax cut for the super-rich that only benefited Wall Street, an aggressive push to build a border wall against Mexico, a harsh anti-immigration program that has punished families and children especially - or relied on a strong economy that was never that strong in the first place thanks to trump's tariff wars and failures to respond to the current pandemic.

In one of the odder things hurting trump now is the one thing trump relied on to win the Republican primaries and eke out an Electoral College win that November: Racism is now hurting trump at a time it's the only thing he's got. To quote David A. Graham at The Atlantic:

As pollsters are at pains to point out, polls are snapshots and not forecasts; Biden’s lead could dissipate, though this race has been unusually stable so far. Contrary to Trump’s protestations, Biden’s lead as it exists now is real—and given how hard it has been for anything to dent Trump’s carapace, it’s worth examining closely. Stranger still, the impetus appears to be race—something that has been both Trump’s Achilles’ heel and his secret weapon throughout his political career. For some reason, it’s affecting his political standing differently than it has before...

...Polls have consistently shown that Americans disapprove of his response to protests of police violence and believe that he has worsened race relations. In the New York Times/Siena poll, race relations (33 percent) and the protests (29 percent) are the only areas where issue approval lags behind his overall vote preference. In the Harvard/Harris poll, the same two areas earn Trump his worst marks of any issue, though they are still slightly higher than his expected vote.

Voters are right that Trump is worsening race relations and handling the protests poorly. In the past two days alone, the president has retweeted (and then deleted) a video of one of his supporters shouting “White power!” and another of two white supporters pointing guns at black protesters marching past their house...

But why? Perhaps it’s just a matter of what issues are most important to voters right now. There’s always been a sizable contingent of reluctant or conflicted Trump supporters. In 2016 exit polls, only 35 percent of voters said Trump had the temperament to be president, but he won 46 percent of the popular vote. These voters are a familiar staple of news coverage too—the ones who preface their support with “I don’t always like the way he phrases it” or “I wish he would tone it down a little, but …” Until now, these voters may have been able to overlook Trump’s other flaws because he was getting done things they liked. But the pandemic has frozen progress on nearly all of Trump’s policy priorities, insofar as they were still alive anyway. Even if voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, it’s no longer much of a positive benefit. And the profusion of news coverage has made issues of race impossible to ignore.

Alternatively, perhaps voters are shifting not just their priorities but their views. As the political scientist Michael Tesler writes, there’s evidence of real shifts in public opinion on race over the past six weeks or so. While views on policing are moving in response to a wide range of incidents, it’s clear that the Floyd case—brutal, senseless, and captured in excruciating clarity on video—has captured white attention in a way other deaths at the hands of police have not...

trump is losing voters among the groups who looked past his earlier racist antics or thought his being in the White House could temper his views. As trump's behavior worsened, however, it seems to have woken a growing number of those who were on the fence to jump off. Given how trump will continue to attack with racism and division, those numbers should get worse for him.

trump's national polling has always wavered in the low 40s, barely ever reaching 50 percent except in various Far Right trackers (and even then not for long). trump's appeal at a state-by-state level hasn't been on that hot either, and considering he's only in the White House due to a state-focused and broken-as-hell Electoral College system, trump does not have any good numbers at all.

Earlier I wrote the only number that mattered was trump's Republican Base: As long as he was as popular with them (in the high 80s-mid-90s) the party leadership wasn't going to do a thing to rein him in (it did not help the Republicans that they wanted a lot of it done anyway because they personally profited from it all).

Today the dynamic is different. To win a general election across enough states to secure the Electoral College, trump has to appeal to the middle-of-the-road, Independent voters to counter the numerical advantages Democrats have. Again, trump has done NOTHING that would appeal to the moderate middle voter set. Where he beat Hillary among No-Party/Indy voters 46-42 percent in the 2016 exit polls, he's trailing Biden with that voter group by about 21 points in the 2020 polls.

This is the other thing hurting trump: Biden is a genuinely more likable figure. Not just a more likable figure than trump - duh - but also a more likable figure than Hillary back in 2016. Where all the negative press Hillary accrued over 25 years as a public figure hurt her, Biden has no such disadvantage even with having a longer public career (and even with a number of faux pas on Biden's resume).

If we can look to what Stanley Greenberg says at The Atlantic about Biden's chances:

But this moment is very different. To start, during the summer and fall of 2016, Clinton never had the kind of national poll lead that Biden now has. She led by an average of four points four months before the election and the same four points just before Election Day. This year, after Biden effectively clinched the nomination, he moved into an average six-point lead over Trump, which has grown to nearly 10 points after the death of George Floyd and the weeks of protests that have followed. The lingering apprehension among Democrats fails to recognize just how much the political landscape has changed since 2016. We are looking at different polls, a different America, and different campaigns with different leaders...

The Clinton campaign’s worst blunder came in September 2016, when the candidate described “half of Trump’s supporters” as “deplorables” and walked right into the white working-class revolt against elites. Her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders had exposed a lack of enthusiasm for her in white working-class suburbs that Barack Obama had won. Her campaign hoped to make up for the lost votes with landslide wins among women, voters of color, and voters in big cities. White working-class voters noticed the lack of respect, and Trump ran up startling margins with them: He won these men by 48 points and women by 27, according to exit polls...

While Biden has said some gaffe-quality stuff about trump's voting base, the media's attempt to float it as a campaign-breaker went nowhere. For one, it happened far too early in 2020 and for another we've had four years to see that Hillary was right. Back to Greenberg:

But much more important than all of that is the sustained, unwavering, and extremely well-documented opposition of the American people to every element of Donald Trump’s sexist, nativist, and racist vision. Indeed, the public’s deep aversion to Trumpism explains why Biden has such a poll lead...

This is where my evaluation of Biden being a Passive-Positive character is going to be a boon to the Democratic Party. Biden's congenial and likable nature on the national stage can help keep that poll lead well into November.

There's a reason why trump and his Republican allies were so desperate to stir up fake scandals against Biden like forcing Ukraine to lie about investigating Biden's son for business dealings there. They were and still are hoping to swiftboat/mudsling Biden down to trump's level of known corruption and vulgarity.

I also wrote a long time ago about first-termers running for re-election back in 2012 when Obama was doing it. As long as the incumbent is genuinely popular with the majority of voters, the incumbent should win. trump is nowhere near genuine popularity and never has been.

So as I said at the beginning of this article, trump has no honest way to win the election in 2020.

Which is why we have every reason to believe trump and his Republican buddies are gonna cheat like hell. Via David Smith at The Guardian:

(Bill) Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark website and director of the advocacy organisation Defending Democracy Together, said in an interview: “The special circumstances with Trump are his total abandonment of any constraints and even more important, perhaps, his having people around him who’ve abandoned any constraints on the way in which they’ll use the federal government, the executive branch, to say things, do things, pretend to do things.

“Richard Nixon did a little of that in 1972, and of course presidents always tout good news in the months before the election. But this time, it’s the degree to which you could have a real sustained effort to suppress minority voting and not make it easy for young people to vote..."

Voter suppression has haunted US elections for decades but the pandemic presents Trump with new opportunities. States are seeking a massive expansion of mail-in ballots so people do not have risk their health by queuing and voting in person. The president has intensified claims that this will lead to widespread cheating, even though several studies have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare...

His wild words are often backed by organizational muscle and action. The Republican National Committee has devoted $20m to opposing Democratic lawsuits across the country seeking to expand voting. Republicans are also reportedly aiming to recruit up to 50,000 people in 15 key states to serve as poll watchers and challenge the registration of voters they believe are ineligible.

Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York, said: “What we’re seeing in some primary states is the closures of polling places in African American dominated areas and mistaken purging of Democrats from the voter rolls. Some of this is anecdotal, but it is worrying all the same. And it will, no doubt, continue through the general election...”

What the Republicans are bound to do is reduce the turnout and discourage voters from showing at all, which gives the more extremist voters eager to do it - which favors the Far Right - more power at the ballot box. By shutting down polling precincts in poor and clearly minority communities - especially Blacks who vote as a 90-95 percent bloc for Democrats - they're definitely discouraging turnout.

The closer the GOP can make the numbers between trump and Biden, the likelier they can flip the mid-sized battleground states like Michigan (and big ones like Florida) same as they did against Hillary in 2016, and steal another Electoral College "victory" even if Biden gets 50 percent of the popular vote with a 6-8 million advantage over the less-loved trump.

This is where voter turnout is the one big key for Democrats and Left-leaning voters (and the sizabler anti-trump voting bloc that's grown since 2016). The only way to beat voter suppression is to show up and force your vote through. The best way to stop the Republicans from playing their rigged game of demographics and gerrymandering is to give Biden such leads in enough states that there's no way it will get "too close to call." They can't rig the machines enough to undercount or misvote every pro-Biden check that gets plugged in. They can't hide it if 500,000 people vote for Biden and pretend it was 250,000. There's only so much the GOP can do before enough people take notice and do something about it.

Get the damn vote out, America. To every anti-trump out there, this is your chance to throat-punch that Shitgibbon. To every Liberal, every Progressive, time to realize you're in the same damn boat and vote with unity. To every person horrified by trump's hatred and sexism, rise up and be counted, dammit.

Don't let the polls distract you. They should motivate us to show up and fulfill the hopes those polls are asking for. OUR NUMBERS MATTER. Let's do this.

That Bubbly Sensation of Hope

I've commented on polling before. I've especially commented on how polling on trump's approval/popularity should be taken with a grain of salt because of how the Far Right adoration of him creates a false impression. For example, the fact that trump rarely if ever slid below the 40 percent approval threshold because the only number that mattered was the too-high 85-90 percent approval from just Republican voters skewing the averages.

Until now.

Referring to Martin Longman at Washington Monthly:

Until today, Trump’s approval numbers had been declining slowly but still holding at around 40 percent. A handful of recent surveys had him falling into the thirties, but they looked like outliers. But now the new AP/NORC survey has him at 34 percent and he’s fallen below the 40 percent threshold in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of polls. Even Rasmussen and Hill-HarrisX have Trump at his lowest mark despite being consistent outliers in his favor...

It's not so much the decline in Republican support trump has - it's still pretty high - it's from the collapse of the Non-Party/Independent voters no longer viewing trump as either/or "effective" / "harmless". In this month of trump running into the brick wall of Pelosi's Democratic House, people are starting to see how bad of a dealer - how inept of a leader - he is.

Looking at the aggregate polling of the last two years actually shows a lower point in trump's polling numbers in late 2017, but he did crawl back out of that into the low-40s where he's usually treading water.

But the likelihood his numbers went up due to the Midterms - when the voting base was invested in turnout for his Congressional allies - is probably an explanation for that rise. Now that trump is on his own again, his numbers are sliding down due to his own bad moves.

It's interesting to note how this compares to previous Presidents. Obama in particular had an oscillating polling chart of approval. But where Obama bounced between 55 percent to 45 percent approval on average, trump is bouncing between 44 to 34 percent, vastly more unpopular than any other person sitting in the White House (even Dubya had months over 50 percent approval).

That's what happens when you're the President Loser of the Popular Vote.

It's that consistency of low polling that has me feeling a bit better about the numbers. The polling for non-Republican voters have sunk to near-record lows for an incumbent Republican candidate. For all the odds that favor incumbency in re-elections, there are election cycles when incumbency can't overcome bad optics. An incumbent who never breaks over the 50 percent water margin in polling even after years in office to prove his (in)abilities isn't going to find enough voters to win again (and trump never even won a majority in the first place).

And trump can't overcome the political axiom from Machiavelli I keep referring to: Always avoid being Hated rather than Feared or Loved, because when you lose people to Hate they will never look at you otherwise and they will do everything they can to throw you out of power.

It's not the low approval numbers, it's the opposite end of the scale, the DISAPPROVAL numbers, and as long as those are at 60 percent or so, trump ain't winning anything other than the 2020 primaries (if any Republican tries to primary him, that is).

There's one other polling number to keep an eye on. Voter turnout. The reason why Dems did so well winning the U.S. House of Representatives against hard odds - Republicans pushing every voter suppression trick in the book - was because voter turnout was the highest for a Midterms (Non-Presidential) Election cycle in over 100 years:

See that sharp spike on the brown line?

Granted, it's not a guarantee the Presidential election turnout (the gray line) will go up, but there is a trend there, you should notice the charts of the two different election cycles tend to match at peaks and valleys.

If there was that sharp a swing UP in voter turnout for the Midterms, we should expect - we should work towards - a similar spike UP in the Presidential Election in 2020.

And that's not a good sign for Republicans or trump: More voters will tend to come not from the extremist voter blocs that show up no matter what, the expanded voter turnout comes from the moderate/Independent voters who are rarely encouraged to vote on their own.

If THAT moderate, Indy leaning bloc shows up to vote in higher numbers, it's usually because of one thing: THEY'RE PISSED. Let's be honest: People don't vote when they're content, they tend to vote angry. And they vote angry against the SOBs mismanaging everything (hint: name rhymes with DUMP).

The 2016 Election cycle wasn't a good indicator of that, sad to note: there was a split among Indy voters 46-42 favoring trump over Hillary. For all my hope during that election cycle, Hillary was hated enough to lose voters. But Hillary's not running this 2020. For all the Far Right will try to do painting the Democratic candidates in as bad a light as Hillary, none of them share Hillary's unfavorable numbers. trump is going to be the most hated candidate on the ticket in 2020, and as Machiavelli warns, never be that hated...

So looking at several factors - trump's unpopularity gap reaching Dubya-esque levels, trump's losing support among non-partisan voters, higher voter turnout - there is a bit of hope this morning. There is a feeling that the nation as a whole is recognizing the nightmare we're in and doing something to stop it.

I did write before that the only number that mattered was the insanely artificially high approval numbers trump got from his Far Right Republican base. Granted, that's still in effect. But all it's doing now is keeping trump out of the mid-20s approval where he deserves to be. As trump starts to hover in the mid-30s at least for longer periods of time, fellow Republicans facing their own re-election concerns are going to view trump as the millstone he is.

The only thing from that point on will be the Far Right Media's control of the Republican Party to keep everyone in line. But even that is going to break sooner or later when their own Narrative can't support a deeply unpopular bastard like trump. Already unelected overlords Coulter and Rush are looking for the lifeboats.

So, today in 2019, there is a reason to know hope.

Problem is, 2020 is still too far away on the calendar to end this nightmare fast enough.

C'MON MUELLER INDICT EVERYBODY BETWEEN trump AND PUTIN ALREADY.

/sigh

What Do I Gotta Do On Polling Around Here, Offer Giveaways Or Something?

I don't think I can get an honest response to the question on whether I should even try a GoFundMe to afford a trip to Prague. It's just... three responses?!

Where are my seven readers?! Did four of you just... leave for warmer climes or something?

Sigh. Lack of a healthy response to even a suggestion of an idea tells me this won't go very far if I try it. 

So much for democratic traditions.

Next time I'll just pull a casino heist or something...

The Only Number That Matters

(Update 12/27/2017: Thank you Batocchio for adding this entry to the annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup for 2017!)

Keeping track of Trump's polling numbers isn't as important as keeping up with - and fighting back against - the terrible actions of his administration, but it's the canary in the coal mine that can tell us just when Trump is truly doomed.

That Trump is already underwater on the polls - starting off his tenure below 50 percent, something NO President has done in the era of modern polling (Eisenhower onward) - does nothing. Everybody knew coming into this that Trump was the least popular winner of the Electoral College loser of the Popular Vote of all time. That he's polling at 38-39 percent now doesn't mean much either.

Right now, the only way Trump leaves office - barring a full four years of his madness, or Gods Help Us he steals the re-election - is through impeachment or the 25 Amendment.

But impeachment only happens through Congress... and Republicans control Congress.

The 25 Amendment removal process only happens through the Cabinet and the Vice President... and Republicans control that.

And the Republicans are cowards.

For all the storm and fury that comes out of the Beltway media, that the party Establishment despises Trump and are just poised to toss him overboard first chance they get, the Republicans are STILL not doing anything about him.

Because for all the bad polling there is on Trump, there is only one number that matters:

How many Republican voters approve of Trump.

From the NBC News/Gallup poll recently done:

Notice the polarized numbers between the three factions of Democrats to Independents to Republicans. Of course the Republicans disapproved of the Democrats - harshly so after 1992 when the partisanship started its avalanche - for Clinton and Obama, and of course the Democrats disapproved of the Republicans from Reagan onward, and while they approved their own guys with high marks. That's not surprising.

It's interesting to note the Independents, how they tend to be approving with only Bill Clinton at 49 percent to start his tenure, and even then that's pretty solid close to 50 percent. Trump is terrible among Independents at 35 percent, that is honestly unheard of to get among the voter bloc that tends to be the less partisan and more optimistic.

But that's unimportant for this argument. What matters is that 87 percent approval Republicans have for Trump.

As long as Trump has that much support among the party base, there is not a damn thing the Republicans in Congress or in the Establishment can do to toss him overboard.

That level of popularity - most likely inflated as a reaction the base has towards the public hostility towards their boy Trump - translates into a lot of angry primary voters come 2018. And that means angry primary challengers (remember Eric Cantor?).

Even those Senators like McCain and Graham who won't have to worry about facing any primary challengers any time soon are wary of directly attacking Trump, lest the voter base - riled up by Fox Not-News and the whole REAL Fake News Breitbart Army - turn against the whole party and risk throwing the midterms to the Democrats.

The GOP will risk the chaos and destruction of the Trump regime because A) they need him to be the scapegoat to the oncoming budget disasters they themselves know their plans are, and B) they honestly fear his - not theirs - base.

They're still cowards. They are delaying the inevitable, and unable to fix their own house of petty angry voters they've unleashed on the electorate these past 25 years.

If they're waiting for Trump's Republican numbers to drop below say 70 percent, they'll have a long wait to endure: the Far Right voting base loves Trump exactly because he pisses the right people off, which includes the Republican Establishment. It's one hell of a Catch-22: The very reason to dump Trump - that he's insane, unstable, incapable of rule, alienating our allies, punishing entire families because of their (Mexican, Arab, and/or Asian) ethnicity, unable to moderate himself to do what the NATION needs out of a President - is the very reason his followers will never abandon him.

It's going to take a disaster worse than Hurricane Katrina - at this point, I doubt a terror strike would even help, because enough Dems and Indys were burned by the fallout of Bush/Cheney's miscues after 9/11 to fall for that again - to drop Trump's Republican approval to a level where he loses enough party support for the GOP to impeach or remove him. And by then, thousands will be dead, hundreds of thousands will be suffering, and it will all be too late.

For the rest of us, the Democrats and the Independents clearly opposed to Trump, the best we can do is keep the pressure up, and run for office. Every seat must be challenged. Every office needs be flipped to those who will fight Trump and his Far Right wingnuts every minute of every day.

Our numbers need to matter more.

Nowhere To Go For Trump But Down

It's noteworthy that since the advent of national polling, no President started their administrations under 50 percent approval. It's due to several factors:

1) The President usually won a majority of popular votes, and still has those voters backing him,
2) There is a bipartisan desire by voters on both sides to wish an incoming President well and to hope for effective leadership,
3) Americans tend to be optimistic, forgiving and hopeful under most circumstances.

So how does any of that apply to Trump?

1) Trump did not win the majority of voters. He wasn't even close, with 3 million more for Hillary and when you throw in the Third Party voters Trump was under by 9 million voters with 45.9 percent (Hillary had 48 percent).
2) Trump (and the Republicans) ran such a bitter and divisive campaign - with Trump himself the most hated candidate in recent memory - that there is no bipartisan desire to support him.
3) The election result - where a broken Electoral College awarded the Presidency to someone a majority of voters didn't want - has created a numbed, shocked, angry response out of a majority of Americans (including non-voters) suddenly fearful and worried about our nation's present and future. This is anecdote on my part, but I can attest to a number of writers I know who are suffering depression and writer's block due to Trump.

We are three weeks in to Trump's administration and he's straddling 40 percent approval in the Gallup poll. His disapproval number is at 55 percent, and it's gone up nearly every 3-day gap in the polling.

Obama didn't sink to 40 percent approval until August 2011, three years into his first term. Dubya didn't sink to 40 percent approval until August 2005, his second term. Bush the Lesser was actually well in the 50s during his first year coming off a contested 2000 election. The response after 9/11 artificially bumped him to 90 percent for a week, but that was under terrible circumstances.

And if Trump has anyone to blame about his poor numbers compared to his two predecessors, he's only got himself to point at in that fancy gold-trimmed mirror of his.

We are living with a Presidential administration that's adept at one thing: Causing unforced errors that creates more problems than solves, and creating more headaches for a federal bureaucracy that has to clean up this mess.

By unforced errors I'm referring to a lot of the bad things - and things that haven't even happened yet - going on in Trump's White House:

• His West Wing is reportedly understaffed. Duties that ought to be delegated or shared out aren't getting done.
• The positions he's filled are staffed by people who are not experienced at those positions or are unlikely to learn those duties fast enough to be effective in crises.
• Trump's management style enforces competition between his underlings, creating factions who fight over resources and time. Trump seems to think this makes the best people thrive. But in government - where people have to team up and share to get large-scale projects done - all this does is sow chaos and create internal factions - in Trump's case between Establishment figures like Priebus and Pence versus the Outsider Fringe figures like Steve Bannon - that backstab each other and leak like faulty dams to a Beltway media always hungry for scandal.

The biggest unforced error was his Week Two attempt to placate his anti-immigrant supporters, issuing an Executive Order that banned refugees that had already been vetted from seven Middle Eastern nations as well as blocking the return of green-card-holding legalized residents from those nations.

This was a major mistake from start to (near) finish. The Order itself is a mess. It wasn't vetted with any White House lawyers, leaving it riddled with vague irregularities. As a result, it conflicts with existing law and - as the courts are finding - conflicts with the Constitution itself (flip to page 25 of the 9th Appellate Court ruling).

The Order made life miserable not just for American legalized residents but also Muslim residents from other countries, caught in the middle of travel to the U.S. for business or family reasons. That turned this into a major international scandal, with our supposed-to-be earnest allies like the United Kingdom - whose Commonwealth incorporates many Muslims and cultures affected by this disaster - publicly debating blocking Trump from official visits. The international outrage still hasn't ebbed.

The outrage here at home was immediate: thousands rushed to the major airports where Muslim travelers were being detained and protested like crazy. Lawyers offered pro bono services to those affected. If you look at that Gallup poll, you might notice the Disapproval numbers for Trump went UP after that weekend. If Trump thought he was going to get a lot of public support for his Muslim ban, he failed.

But that's a sign of how Trump is going to rule: Entirely on impulse, focused on brutal satisfaction to hurt others, and relying on his overwhelmed handlers to clean up the mess.

This is not effective leadership.

This is exactly what 62 million morans voted for when they backed an ill-informed, impulsive, ignorant bankrupt fraud of a failed businessman whose only success had been to trademark his name.

The reasons he hasn't been impeached yet are because the Republicans in the House need him around long enough to sign their impending disastrous tax-cut legislation, and those same Republicans are terrified of angering their party base still in love with this failure.

This means Trump will continue to misbehave. Even in the wake of losing his National Security Advisor Flynn to a major - and ONGOING - scandal, Trump won't learn. Trump will keep bulldozing across the landscape, whining about everybody else making his own poll numbers go down as he pulls off more outlandish and illegal stunts.

Who the hell is going to corral Trump from turning his weekend home Mal-A-Laugho into Spy Central? Who the hell is going to stop Trump's administration from constantly lying its collective ass off? Who the hell is going to keep Trump from insulting more of our allies and ruining more of our businesses to improve his own bottom line?

He's not going to win anybody over. He's losing whatever undecideds are left. He's already lost the 65 million who voted for Hillary. He's bound to start losing Republicans who actually care for things like competence and coherency in policy. He's polling right about where Dubya started losing people during the epic disaster that was Katrina... and Trump hasn't had his own Katrina yet. That is not a question of IF concerning this West Wing, it's a matter of WHEN.

This is going to keep going in a downward spiral.

This is not going to end well.

Update (2/16): Saw this on Twitter. Pew Research Center has this chart on how poorly Trump is doing with the general public:

Trump is double Clinton's unfavorables. And Bill still had 56 percent approval.

Whoa Babe Just a Little Bit R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and Why Trump Ain't Getting Any

If there is any joy to find this dismal winter of discontent, it's the malicious joy of watching Trump fumble his way to the podium. Not the growing and alarming revelations of just how nasty his ties to Russia are turning out to be - that's actually making me turn away in horror - but the fact that Trump is still historically, epically (yes, Stephen King will kill me for the adverb use) unpopular with the universe. Via Matthew Yglesias with Vox.com:

On January 10, Quinnipiac released the first big Donald Trump poll of 2017, and it showed that he retains some strengths as a politician. Most voters think he’s intelligent (gaakkkk) and that he’s a “strong person.” (headdesk) A plurality believe he has “good leadership skills.” (o.o)

But his job approval rating is a dismal 37 percent, with 51 percent saying they disapprove of the job he’s doing. Rather than being an effective political tactic, Trump’s habit of frequently saying untrue things has led Americans to conclude by a 53-39 margin that he is not honest. Fifty-two percent say that Trump “does not care about average Americans,” and 62 percent say that he is “not level-headed.”

Just remember kids: this asshole didn't win the Popular vote, he won a broken-down Electoral College.

Sure, Trump got 62 million voters, but as I pointed out a few posts ago our elections are now so partisan that a dead dog could have gotten 62 million votes for the Republicans. I can guarantee you millions of his own voters hated him (they just hated or mistrusted Hillary more).

How historic a disaster is this?

Gallup created a comparative chart of Trump's beginning numbers compared to his predecessors Obama and Bush II and Bill Clinton:

Each of these Presidents were divisive in some respects: Clinton's win in 1992 came from a contested three-candidate race that the Republicans could not abide; Bush the Lesser lost the Popular vote and only won the Electoral College over a contested vote count in Florida (and a 5-4 SCOTUS vote); Obama won the Popular and Electoral but was hated by a Republican party that viewed him as illegitimate and a threat.

Yet all three still had high approval ratings - at least over 60 percent - going into the White House.

There are two very good reasons for this.

First reason is that a majority of Americans - regardless of party or even if they voted - want to think that the incoming President will do well and they wish him well. After all, if he succeeds the nation succeeds. It's called the Honeymoon period. It can last a few months or almost a year during which voters will give him the benefit of the doubt.

The second reason is that all three President-Elects played the public image of a Uniter, giving speeches and presentations alongside both parties to demonstrate no ill-will and to invoke signs of humility and empathy to the electorate. A perfect example is Dubya: having won a bitter contest on questionable grounds, he made a public victory speech where he spoke in humble tones about working with Democrats, and made pointed efforts towards bipartisanship:

Tonight I chose to speak from the chamber of the Texas House of Representatives because it has been a home to bipartisan cooperation. Here in a place where Democrats have the majority, Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent.

We've had spirited disagreements. And in the end, we found constructive consensus. It is an experience I will always carry with me, an example I will always follow...

Granted, once in office Bush and Cheney pursued their hard-core conservative tax cuts and policy initiatives. But he played the part of Uniter well and got his Honeymoon polling numbers in the mid-60s where his political capital had value.

So why is Trump failing at Reasons One AND Two? He's well below the 50 percent mark, and with the Quin poll at 37 percent he's slinking downward with the general public before he's done anything in office to make him even more unliked (which happens to every President, Reagan included).

Big point: Trump is no Uniter figure. His own personal nature as a bully makes that impossible. His history of vulgar and disruptive behavior is a major reason why he's been so unpopular this entire election process. And the stories about him have only gotten worse.

The final most damning part: Trump shows no respect to those he views his lessers. And that includes everyone among his own Republican ranks and his own damn voters (he's publicly admitted as much).

Machiavelli, I know I keep referring back to him, but his passage in The Prince about whether it's better to be Loved or Feared still makes a ton of sense in an electoral system like ours that runs on emotional and irrational decision-making.

Machiavelli noted it was difficult to be loved and feared at the same time, so it was preferred to be feared. He warned, however, that Fear could lead to Hate if you try to employ fear too often. And being Hated was the worst thing a Prince (leader) could become, because in that state the leader's opposition will have nothing to lose and everything to gain by driving you from power.

And Trump is coming into this role of President so very very HATED. Behaving like he's the greatest winner of all time when he really got Second Place, dismissing entire swaths of our population with insults and disdain... People hate him - myself included - with the fire of a thousand suns.

I honestly never saw - or felt - this level of animosity among my co-workers and friends towards an elected President before. Clinton never had this much hate (even after all the mud slung at him in 1992), Bush the Lesser didn't create massive protests against himself before his own tenure started, and Obama's haters were mostly contained to Rush Limbaugh's radio show and the Fox Not-News squad.

Once they hate you, it is hard to turn that emotion into something else.

The real prize for a Prince was to be Respected, a reputation that can co-exist with both Love and Fear. With Respect, a leader can be Feared as long as his subjects were convinced he knew what he was doing and capable at it. With Respect, a leader can be Loved as long as his subjects understood his Love for them was genuine, and borne of responsibility and care for their mutual well-being.

The thing about Respect, it's not given it is earned. As the saying goes, Respect Goes Both Ways. You have to show it towards others to have them respect you.

And Trump, mentioned above, does not respect you. Unless you happen to be Putin.

It shouldn't be any surprise that Trump doesn't get any respect back from the rest of us.

And without that respect, Trump is hated. And getting hundreds of thousands of protesters marching in the streets against him before Day One of his administration even starts.

It's a damn shame it took all these events and revelations after the election for more Americans to figure this out.

Things would be less dreadful and horrifying if 37 percent was his voting base on Election Night.

And we wouldn't have 62 million Americans to blame for the oncoming train wreck.