This weekend's hopium

There is a channel I follow on Telegram called Military & Strategic, and is typically signed by a blogger who refers to himself or herself as The Analyst. The primary topic is the on-going Russo-Ukraine war, but US politics gets mentioned from time to time, which is very pertinent to the Ukrainian cause. Here is one of The Analyst's most recent posts, which deals with the prospects for the Harris/Walz campaign's success in November:

GROWING CONFIDENCE IN A DEMOCRATIC VICTORY

We all know how important the coming election is in the US. We are quite literally faced with a fork in the road - one side takes us down a dark and dangerous path towards a semi-fascist autocracy and the other is the real America that despite its many flaws is a decent and honest democrat at its core. It’s a truly shocking difference in possible futures.

However I am ever more certain that Kamala Harris will win the presidency. I am growing more certain that the Democrats will regain the House, and just about hold onto the Senate with a 50-50 (the Vice President is President of the Senate and casts the tie breaker, so Democrats would hold it that way). There’s even a possibility they may hold it 51-49.

The reason I think this, having just spent the morning and early afternoon online with my colleagues over there, is a slew of new polls that are quite different from the usual ones. These are very granular and observe the key districts in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Nebraska 2nd District, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Back in 2016, while the main polls were forecasting Hilary Clinton would win, these were showing very clear leads for Donald Trump. Almost every one of them marked him out as having a substantial lead. In one where Harris is polling now at 48% to Trump at 39%, he lead by 49% to 32% for Hillary Clinton. The same district gave Biden a 2% margin over Trump in 2020, so Harris having a lead at this level in such an notoriously fickle district is remarkable. This type of result with variations in the numbers, out of 25 districts across the swing states, shows her winning from 2-10 points. If these polls are as profoundly accurate as they were in 2012 (most showed Obama winning over Mitt Romney by just 0.5-1 point), 2016, and 2020, then things are looking good.

What makes these polls so special is they are only usually run at two points - one in July and one now. Many of the big polling companies ignore them because they lack frequency, but Democrats are over the moon with the positivity and we know the Republicans are in full panic mode.

How do we know the Trump cult is worried? On Friday, 27 pro-Republican polls were released, all of them showing Trump winning. We already know that the source is pro-Trump because they always have been. In most cases they only poll Republicans and add a handful of democrats to make it look real. The purpose of these polls isn’t to convince the media or Trump supporters, its to skew the polling averages and create a false impression. 

Why do they need to create the false impression of an impending victory? This is just one of those key tenets of fascism - skew the perception of the truth to suit your agenda. Trump has a money problem. He hasn’t raised anything like the staggering $1 billion plus (and that’s just from small donors), that the Democrats have. They don’t have the money and with ever more indications that they’re losing, coupled to Trump’s inability to speak with a civil tongue in his head without resorting to racial invective and mad theories only the paid up cult members believe, the donors are keeping their wallets shut. There are only so many people wanting to buy golden assassination edition sneakers for $500 or knock off Chinese watches for $100k, or a Donald Trump bible for $99, or a $100 glass Melania in a wedding dress ‘collectibles’.

It doesn’t help that yesterday the man with the couch habit and potential Vice-President ‘Shady’ JD Vance, when asked who the most important person was going to be in the next Trump administration, gave a deeply disturbing technical answer: The Attorney General, because the new administration will need to find and prosecute Trumps political, media, and ‘deep state’ opponents to make America ‘free’ again. This concept is not an America George Washington, or any of the other founders would have imagined when they wrote the constitution. 

Let's hope The Analyst is right.

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