Before we start, check out the latest in my Allamakee County Chronicles over at Glibertarians!
Here’s an interesting piece on the relative sizes of Trump and Biden rallies. Excerpt:
If polls didn’t exist, who would you say was winning the election right now?
It’s a serious question. Would it be the guy who has massive rallies every day, many of them spontaneous, or the guy who stays in his basement every day, drawing scant crowds the rare times he comes up for air?
Joe Biden is up eight points in the RCP national average. This is no small thing. Yes, pollsters got it wrong in 2016, but they tend to correct for past mistakes. They have reputations to maintain.
But are they just biased? Conservative Twitter seems to think so. The “game,” many think, is to build a false narrative about Biden being way up and then correct the bias at the very end. That’s when pollsters get judged, you see, by the last poll. If they were way off a month before the election, who’s to say they were wrong? Public opinion changes.
But I have looked at the samples used by literally hundreds of polls, and I am not seeing any significant sampling bias. I’m not sure at all that’s going on, and if Republicans are counting on it, they shouldn’t.
But:
Today, I went to a Trump rally. I wanted to see one up close for myself, and it was an eye-opening experience.
The rally had about three hundred cars. There were no prominent speakers or otherwise big draws. Just random people. There were truckers and bikers, and even a guy in a Bentley. Interestingly, more than fifty percent were women. I recognized a few that I knew, and was surprised they were on the Trump side of the fence. They told me they typically have to keep their views close to the vest. Cancel culture.
No one with any connection to the Trump campaign had anything to do with organizing the event, it was all word of mouth. This is a phenomenon being played out all across the country, and it’s one we’ve never witnessed in our political history.
The rally started in Greenwich, Connecticut, and traveled about twenty miles out I-95 and back. This is deep-blue Connecticut, by the way. No Trump yard signs anywhere. And yes, we got the finger a few times, but the overwhelming reaction from others was wildly supportive. Hundreds of cars honked in approval. Scores of people waved excitedly from overpasses or by intersections.
It was like someone had given them permission to publicly show their support for Trump without suffering some sort of backlash. There was palpable joy at seeing so much Trump support in a place like Connecticut.
This, True Believers, is why I’m having a really hard time buying the polling. It’s easy to get a little discouraged at the polling, when you imagine Groper Joe (as a sock puppet for Round-Heels Harris, as everyone with active brain cells knows would be the case) in the Imperial Mansion.
But those rallies!
I watched a couple of Trump rallies over the weekend last. The President clearly enjoys those rallies; he projects the Happy Warrior image like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. And the crowds eat it up. By contrast, the Democrat ticket’s events are just… tepid.
Groper Joe still shows a lead in the battleground states. The polls failed badly in 2016, but surely the polling organizations have adjusted their models accordingly.
But those rallies!
The Democrats have counted on the black community’s votes for decades now. But the President’s approval ratings in that community, especially among young black men, have been spiking. Without the monolithic support of that community, the Dems have no shot, and I really think we’re seeing the beginnings of a preference cascade here. The Dems claim to still have a lock, but they are beginning to sound like they are whistling past the graveyard. They claim support from the aging “leaders of the black community.”
But those rallies!
In a week, we’ll know.
