Monday's Final Word

AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson

I swear it's Monday! Really! I double-checked! ...

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And I was on the ground at '16, I was on the ground at '20 in Pennsylvania, I have been on the ground this year. It feels a lot more like '16 than '20. In '16, we had a very high-profile, famous woman at the top of the ticket with a lot of celebrity endorsements. In '20, we had Pennsylvania's third senator, one of the favorite sons, Scranton Joe, campaigned a lot with Ed Rendell, lived in the Philly area basically.

So what does it look like? Does it look more like '16 or does it look like '20? And I think that it looks a little bit more like '16. And we will find out in the dispositive places. I think Bucks County, '16, Trump narrowly lost. Biden expanded his lead there a little bit. There's more registration now, Republican registration there. And in Philadelphia County, Trump increased a little bit in '20. And so what do those Republican Jewish women do in the Philly suburbs? Do Did they prioritize abortion or is that RJC? Do they prioritize anti-Zionism and antisemitism?

Ed: This is part of the same conversation as the clip above. These are the observations of CNN's David Urban. He sees Pennsylvania much as Salena Zito has been reporting it. 

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“My sense of the early vote is it is not as disastrous as it was in the first three days to the Democrats, but it’s still really bad. And the Harris campaign has done a great job of spinning the national media on it,” Halperin said. “And when you talk to people in the states, there’s two categories of people in the states. There’s more junior people who don’t lie about the data and what it means. What you have now is tons of senior Democrats are in the states, they’re door-knocking, like people who have run presidential campaigns are literally going to Michigan and Pennsylvania and door-knocking.”

“And those people are honest with me because they’re worried. And they’re not in the business … like Wilmington is. They’re really worried, okay? They may be wrong, they may be wrongly worried,” he continued. “The Pennsylvania numbers, when they come out today, if she’s below a 400,000 vote lead compared to [President Joe] Biden’s lead in 2020, it’s gonna be problematic for her.”

Ed: As of this afternoon, it came in right at 410,000 -- but that's still a huge problem. In 2020, Democrats had a lead on early voting of over a million ballots, and only won the state by 81,000 votes

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The weight of the evidence leads me to predict Donald Trump will win the Electoral College and could under a best-case scenario even win the popular vote.

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I’ll explain my reasoning below. Nevertheless, I’m locking in my final answer: Trump wins the Electoral College 297 to 241, with Kamala Harris winning the popular vote 49.6% to 48.3%.

Congress goes GOP, too. 

Ed: Henry Olsen is usually pretty careful in his predictions. He calls Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia for Trump as well as Nevada, with everything else being essentially the same as 2020. 

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In reviewing polling data and talking to two major Arab-American advocates who have been deeply involved in their communities for decades, it now appears that one wing of this community is moving to solidify their age-old conservative values and lean towards Republicans.

But because of the war in the Middle East, the other part of this community has also become more radicalized.

As a result, both wings are decisively abandoning the Democratic Party. And the main beneficiaries appear to be the Republican Party as well as the staunchly anti-Israel Green Party.

Ed: Pandering doesn't really work when you're trying to pander simultaneously to two diametrically opposed groups. Whether this is enough to cost Harris a win in Michigan remains to be seen -- but she and Biden both thought this was a significant enough demo in the election to cast a key democracy ally as the villain in a war started by terrorists. 

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Since 1980, in the 11 presidential elections in which the incumbent party has lost the White House, only 25% of Americans on average believed that the country was headed in the right direction. The lowest point was 11% in 2008, right before the financial crisis hammered the nation. The result? A massive win for the Democrats, led by Barack Obama, which flipped the White House from Republican to Democrat. What’s the takeaway? When “right direction” numbers are this low, the incumbent party historically struggles to retain the White House.

But we can’t rely on historical precedent alone to predict this election, and here’s why: Kamala Harris is running instead of the actual incumbent, Joe Biden. But history still has some lessons to offer. When sitting presidents decide not to run for re-election, it rarely ends well for their party — especially for Democrats.

Ed: This may become its own precedent. We have never had a major-party candidate win the primaries only to be forced off the ticket. On top of that, we've never seen a party anoint a non-incumbent nominee rather than subject them to some sort of competitive process. This is off-the-charts autocracy, in an environment where voters are already deeply unhappy with the status quo.

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And one person after another has confided in me that they’re voting for Trump, but they’re afraid to say so publicly, because it will affect their friends/job/customers.

Crushing defeat is coming for the oppressive. big government machine represented by the Kamala puppet.

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David Strom 1:00 PM | December 09, 2024
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