In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've mentioned here several times Nate Silver's advice to the Biden campaign last Febsruary Biden can still win. But he's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it. Neither is so implausible and it is likely to be a close race. But even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. The single biggest problem Silver saw is Biden's age, and the campaign needed to do something: A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits becaus...

As of mid-April, the conventional wisdom had been that Biden was closing the gap with Trump. But as of this past Sunday, things changed, first with CNN : Donald Trump continues to hold an advantage over President Joe Biden as the campaign – and the former president’s criminal trial – move forward, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. And in the coming rematch, opinions about the first term of each man vying for a second four years in the White House now appear to work in Trump’s favor, with most Americans saying that, looking back, Trump’s term as president was a success, while a broad majority says Biden’s has so far been a failure. Trump’s support in the poll among registered voters holds steady at 49% in a head-to-head matchup against Biden, the same as in CNN’s last national poll on the race in January, while Biden’s stands at 43%, not significantly different from January’s 45%. This, of course, is a six-point lead, although this is in a theoretical national popul...

BREAKING – EXPOSING THE CIA: “So the agencies kind of, like, all got together and said, we’re not gonna tell Trump…Director of the CIA would keep [information from Trump]…” A project manager working in Cyber Operations for the @CIA and an @NSAGov contractor with top-secret… pic.twitter.com/TXq8ZjJEBq — James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) May 1, 2024 In a story even the alt media has either ignored or quickly passed over, James O'Keefe released undercover video of a CIA contractor saying agency bigwigs withheld information from Trump and spied on him . The video showed Amjad Fseisi, a project manager working in Cyber Operations for the CIA with top-secret clearance: Amjad reveals to OMG’s Undercover American Swiper that intel agencies not only kept intelligence information from a sitting United States President and Commander-In-Chief, they also used FISA to spy on President Trump and his team and are still monitoring President Trump according to Amjad who says, “We monito...

I've remarked here on how early in this campaign cycle we've seen Democrat insiders sounding alarms about Joe's campaign , especially in comparison to earlier epic defeats for McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis. and Kerry. In 1972, especially after the Eagleton fiasco, there was never any serious expectation that McGovern could beat Nixon, so that election is an outlier -- but even then, the real pessimism didn't even take hold until McGovern was nominated. In the 2024 cycle, we're seeing gnashing of teeth and rending of garments a full year before the election. There was a brief surge of optimism in the middle of last month, when prognosticators like Sean Trende and Nate Silver thought they saw Joe closing the gap on Trump, but oddly, a single poll from CNN over the past weekend seems to have ended those fantasies. But something seems to be replacing the previous pattern of unattrributed insider discomfort we used to see during the summers before the election: now ...

More than a week ago, I pointed out Sean Trende's blunder when he hopped on the bandwagon that "President Biden’s standing in the polls has improved". Another arbiter of the conventional wisdom, Byron York of the Washington Examiner, pointed out late yesterday , Biden did rise a bit in the polls. According to the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Trump has led Biden in head-to-head matchups since September 2023. (They were tied for one brief moment in October.) During his March-April “bump,” Biden’s deficit shrank, coming within two-tenths of a point of catching Trump. Democratic hopes rose. “Biden’s position in the polls is improving against Trump,” declared the polling analyst Nate Silver on April 18. “It looks to me like Biden’s numbers against Trump have improved by a hair, probably to a degree that isn’t just statistical noise.” Even a slight improvement was like manna from heaven for Democrats and their allies in the media. Alas, it didn’t last...

US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the District of Southern Florida is overseeing the United States v Trump case regarding the mishandling of classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. Beginning Monday, April 22, she has been releasing versions of documents in the case that had previously been heavily redacted. The unredacted court filings published on April 22 revealed, among other things, the code name Plasmic Echo for the FBI investigation into those documents, and I covered this development here last Friday . In that post, I linked to a Washington Examiner story that described the release as covering "hundreds of pages of exhibits, motions, and other filings, underscored the close communication the Biden White House and the National Archives and Records Administration had in the year before Trump was indicted". Alt journalists have since been combining through those files. One result has been a not-fully-explicated theory that many of the docum...

News about two sets of polls over the weekend brings me back to the question I raised a week ago , in which I cited Rush Limbaugh's often-expressed view that the polls aren't meant to report the news, they're meant to shape it. So in that context, what are we to make of the weekend's new polls showing Trump trending ahead of Joe once again? For CNN : Former President Donald Trump has opened his biggest lead ever captured in the CNN poll of the American electorate, enjoying a six-point advantage over incumbent Democrat President Joe Biden. Trump, at 49 percent, is six percent ahead of Biden’s 43 percent when the two are polled head-to-head. For Gallup , President Joe Biden averaged 38.7% job approval during his recently completed 13th quarter in office, which began on Jan. 20 and ended April 19. None of the other nine presidents elected to their first term since Dwight Eisenhower had a lower 13th-quarter average than Biden. . . . Jimmy Carter is the only ...