In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday I posted on how uncomfortable I've become with the RealClearPolitics model of the election, whereby Trump leads Biden by a small aggregate anount in battleground states, and this situation hasn't changed in six months. Yet issues like inflation and illegal immigration haven't been fixed. while Biden's deteriorating physical and mental condition have become increasingly visible. On top of that, the enthusiasm levels of the Trump and Biden campaigns are increasingly in contrast. I pointed to little-reported trends in states outside the conventional-wisdom battlegrounds like Minnesota, Oregon, and Virginia, and by coincidence, I noticed a new Roanoke College poll that says Trump is tied with Biden in Virginia. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are tied (42%-42%) in a head-to-head matchup in Virginia, while Biden holds a two-point lead (40%-38%) when other candidates are included, according to the Roanoke College Poll. The Institute ...

Sean Trende, the Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics, is the keeper of the conventional wisdom on Trump's outlook for the election. The odd thing is that the Democrats, other than Biden himself, are the ones who've signed on to it. For instance, Clinton pollster Mark Penn takes the conventional line just this morning at RCP : Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the Harvard-CAPS/Harris polls by about 5 points and in the FoxNews polls by 3 points as of May 24. It is closer in the Real Clear Politics average that shows a gap of only 1.1%, but swing state polls across the media show Trump routs in almost all of them. What bothers me is that none of this has changed in six months. Public perceptions of the New York hush money trial have been, if anything, favorable toward Trump. Rallies and campaign events like those in New Jersey and the Bronx have been surprisingly well-attended. In contrast, Biden's public performance has been consistently embarrassing...

The big news this morning is the headline in Politico, Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden . “You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely. But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said. Except just this past weekend, Prominent Democratic strategist James Carville slammed his own party Saturday in a rant in which he called its messaging “full of s–t” — and accused the Biden campaign of worrying too much about the war in Gaza. Carville, who helped run Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 White House campaign, ripped into national Democrats as polls continue to show President Biden struggling in his likely rematch with former President Donald Trump. As early as February, Ezra Klein, a prominent liberal columni...

The one thing I've noticed throughout this election cycle is how early everything has been taking place vis-a-vis all the other presidential election cycles I've lived through. I've mentioned here several times that previous leaks from insiders that a losing campsign isn't going well tend to happen in late summer and early fall; this time, we saw calls from influential Democrats for Joe to withdraw as early as February. Just this past week, the Biden campaign issued the ad linked above, which is a last-ditch play to win back African-American voters by taking out-of-context remarks from Trump as long ago as 1989 to prove he's a racist. This reminded me of Jimmy Carter's failing campaign in 1980 and his desperate attempt to brand Ronald Reagan as a racist -- except this took place that September , not in May, which Biden is doing this year: It was a mistake, tactically, to call Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign racist. Reagan’s opponent, Jimmy ...

It's hard to enumerate all the takeaways from Trump's Bronx rally, which seems to have dominated yesterday's news. It's a contrarian's paradise. Let's go to what almost nobody's mentioned, the attempt by the left at a counterdemonstration : When I exit the park, I happen upon dozens of police officers in riot gear. Young men and women—draped in keffiyehs and many in N95 masks—are standing behind them on a giant rock, shaking a sign that says, “[redacted] Trump / [redacted] Biden / The people of the Bronx / We run this [redacted].” “They don’t give a [redacted] about you,” the protesters chant at the Trump crowd, clapping between words. The police were there in riot gear to anticipate any contingency, but my impression from the few accounts in the media is that there simply weren't enough potential counterdemonstrators there to start a riot, much as they would have wanted one. I imagine that the media was disappointed, too -- a riot wo...

I've long thought the whole public narrative about Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's "sugar bro" who is generally reported to have "loaned" Hunter upwards of $6.5 million to settle his tax case and pay his rent and legal expenses, just doesn't fit. For starters, I'm not his accountant, but he and his wife have eight-figure homes in both New York and Malibu, he has a private jet, and their living expenses have to be through the roof. Morris himself is a failed writer and doesn't seem to have worked as an attorney for years. Nobody like that has $6.5 million in mad money. I posted last week that sources close to Morris had told Politico that he could no longer afford to pay Hunter's legal bills. My suspicion was that Hunter's lawyer Abbe Lowell, who is reported to bill as much as $1500 an hour, had secured liens on Morris's New York and Malibu properties to be sure he gets paid, and Morris's wife, the Hollywood agent Gaby Morgerman, ...

Let's face it, the whole New York hush money trial has been a distraction. Each day has new breathless headlines: will there be a hung jury? will Trump testify? what if Trump is convicted? what will Judge Merchan do next? None of this matters. If there's a hung jury, Trump's progress will continue. If he's convicted, the pattern up to now has been the one since last fall: every time he's lost in a New York courtroom, his poll numbers go up. If he's jailed, I suspect his sons and other surrogates will campaign on his behalf, and his poll numbers will go up even more -- except I think even his opponents recognize this would be a disastrous outcome for them. T his view from the far left actually outlines the real issue with surprising insight: [A] sizable number of voters either don’t remember or misremember the four turbulent years of the Trump administration. But paradoxically, educating voters about the potential consequences of a Biden defeat could...