Politics

Pittsburgh On the eve of the 2020 election, as President Trump and former VP Joe Biden are neck-in-neck, Pennsylvania is emerging as the most significant state. Pollsters and pundits predict that, as this crucial swing state goes, so will the nation. On Saturday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s leading local newspaper, endorsed Donald Trump, the first time it has endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Four years ago, talking with Western Pennsylvanians at random revealed unlikely pockets of support for Trump. Synthesizing interviews, voter registration patterns and breaking news, I speculated Pennsylvania would pivot red — and it did.

The Biden campaign is far from confident heading into Tuesday's election and their behavior proves it. It's not uncommon for campaigns to blitz multiple states with television ads and rally appearances in the final few days before the election; Trump, for example, has been holding multiple rallies per day in key swing states. However, Biden's last minute rush to turn out the vote stands in stark contrast to his months-long strategy of sitting back and letting Trump talk his way out of victory. Clearly the campaign is feeling some serious unease with the latest polls and is second guessing keeping Joe in the basement for so long.

Aaron Sibarium has written a fascinating article for American Purpose on the parallels between the current American republic and the Weimar republic. It’s worth reading on its own merits as a history lesson, as a reminder that no people is immune to time and tide, as a reflection on how democracy can turn into disaster. It’s worth reading even if you disagree, as I do.

Rioters and looters in Philadelphia may have just paved Trump's road to victory in Pennsylvania. Biden helped last week when he admitted during the final presidential debate that he wanted to phase out US oil production. It was a boneheaded thing to say while trying to court blue-collar Americans in swing states, many of whom work in the energy sector. Now, Trump also has the 'law and order' narrative on his side. Walter Wallace Jr, a 27-year-old black man, was shot and killed by police in Philadelphia on Monday. It only took until that evening for protests to turn to looting and rioting. Just like in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland and other major cities, businesses were destroyed and individuals were harmed.

In the end, there was nothing the protesting left, the heavily slanted progressive media or the Democratic party could do. Amy Coney Barrett is now a Supreme Court justice. Cable news voices like Jake Tapper were left aghast that she dared to attend her swearing-in ceremony at the White House. That was it. Going forward, we are left with a litany of threats about court packing (legislatively expanding the amount of seats on the Supreme Court) and ending the legislative filibuster. The latter would allow Democrats to pass a radical agenda, which includes statehood for Washington DC and Puerto Rico, a Green New Deal to end fossil fuels and whatever other fanatical ideas have been floating around in progressive circles.

In just over a week, the Empire hopes to strike back. Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Biden voted for the biggest and most foolish intervention of that era, the Iraq War of 2003. He has not so much repudiated this act as tried to exculpate himself for it, claiming that in voting to authorize military force he didn’t think military force would be used. This is not credible on its face, and not the way anyone understood the vote at the time. It was as clear a vote for war as any vote has been since World War Two.

It’s hard not to be impressed by Donald J. Trump’s sheer tenacity, especially when you consider he just had COVID. The President just gave a very long and energetic speech at a rally in New Hampshire, and now he’s off again on to another event in Maine. ‘I’m doing three or four of these suckers a day,’ he says. ‘That’s not bad.’ He’s drastically down in the polls. All those clever mathematical models suggest he has about a 10 percent chance of winning. Yet he’s a fanatically competitive man, an extraordinary campaigner, and a political force that nobody quite understands. He is also a great finisher.

Make no mistake about it, I’m a suburban middle-class mom of two and a Trump supporter. I have been ever since I saw him coming down that escalator. I’m voting for Donald Trump because he has clear, defined goals for Americans — all Americans — and for America. Despite the left’s constant attacks on him, he persists and delivers — that’s tenacity. He doesn’t back down. He’s a fighter and that’s what we need for our country, now more than ever. When I voted for him in 2016, I saw this man as more of a regular American than any career politician. What you see is what you get. Just the truth — that’s what we needed in 2016 and what we still need in 2020.

Election polling has been largely consistent since the pandemic hit the US: Joe Biden is the heavy favorite. But one historically accurate pollster is sticking to his own data, which shows a closer race than expected.Raghavan Mayur is the president and founder of TechnoMetrica, which runs the IBD/TIPP poll. His polling predicted the winner of the past four presidential elections. IBD/TIPP was one of only two polls in 2016 that had Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton. Mayur has received widespread praise for his accuracy, yet he still largely remains an outlier in 2020 polling.‘I’m a small business guy — I don’t have the time to go around looking at what other people do,’ he told The Spectator. ‘I do what we do. And it has turned out to be pretty good.