Among legitimate polls, the most recent— YouGov’s for The Economist— has Kamala up over Señor T 46-43% among registered voters. Nate Silver’s polling average shows pretty much the same thing— Kamala leading Señor T 49.2% to 45.4% (3.8 points). Silver says he can’t predict who will win in November but her Tuesday afternoon update is direct: if the election were held today, she “would be a clear favorite.” He attributes her big lead over Trump to a convention bounce. The swing states he’s tracking show her crushing Trump in the electoral college. He’s up by 0.6 in Georgia and 4.7 in Florida— which no one else has considered a swing state in over a decade. She’s up in every other swing state and has positive momentum in all of them (including Georgia and Florida). Take a minute and look at this graphic:
A lot of people consider Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, a pro-torture, disciple of Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and former George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld speechwriter, an imbecile. No argument from me on that one. In his weekly GOP propaganda piece yesterday, noting that a sitting vice president has won just once in 188 years (George H.W. Bush) he concluded that
a- Kamala isn’t likely to be next and
b- Voters should realize that a Harris presidency would be a second Biden term.
As usual, he’s wrong on both counts. She’s very likely to be the next sitting vice president to be elected president and her term will be a much bigger nightmare for old school reactionaries like Thiessen. He says history won’t allow it and people wanted a third Reagan term but they don’t want a second Biden term. She’s not Biden; she’s better. And no one— except MAGA crazies like Thiessen— wants a second Trump term, which is clearly-- inarguably-- what’s on the table.
A huge majority of voters have been telling pollsters for a year they don’t want Biden and don’t want Trump. The Democrats eased Biden out of the picture; the Republicans couldn’t get rid of Trump if their lives depended on it— which is pretty much the case... or at least their careers depend on it.
Thiessen cites an unreliable conservative pollster to prove that Biden’s policies are unpopular. He’s entitled to believe whatever poll confirms his views but let me point out that one instead:
He’s convinced himself— and is trying to convince his readers— that the country hates Kamala because of Gaza, the border and because people want GOP austerity economics but only brainwashed MAGA nuts fall for that idiocy. The last failed “border czar” was Donald J. Trumpanzee. The evidence that people have rejected GOP Austerity is overwhelming and there isn’t a person in the world who thanks Trump would be better on Gaza other than those committed to genocide, which there is no doubt that Thiessen is.
He weeps in print that “Democrats have been in power for the past 3 1/2 years and have held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years. But, so far, that strategy is working. A new Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll finds that 64 percent say Harris had only some or very little influence on Biden’s economic policies, while 57 percent say she had only some or very little influence on his border policies.”
His advice for Trump is that Mr. Credibility persuade the voters who already hate him that Kamala is actually Biden in a pants suit. That’s not going to work, especially with some senile old guy with the attention span of a gnat as the meandering messenger.
I laughed when I saw the title of this piece. Mark is a moron and his pieces have been ludicrous. WAPO has been falling down the rabbit hole for a while but The NY Times is way ahead. The latter has become a pedestal of two sides-ism - its headline writer should be fired, along with a few of its editorial writers.