By Mike Huckabee
August 21, 2019
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A new CNN poll shows that Kamala Harris, who seemed to be rising after the first debate where she blindsided Joe Biden as a busing-opposing racist, is now sinking fast after opponents publicized her record of keeping people in prison regardless of pesky details such as their innocence when she was California Attorney General.
This latest poll shows Harris has sunk to just 5% while Biden has regained a double digit lead. He’s still 10 points lower than he was a couple of months ago, but he has 29% support, well ahead of Bernie Sanders (15%) and Elizabeth Warren (14%.)
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/08/poll-kamala-harris-is-sinking.php
At the link, Paul Mirengoff of the Powerline blog points out that all the Democratic poll frontrunners are legislators instead of anyone with executive experience at actually running anything (Biden doesn’t count as someone who’s actually run something, having been a Vice President.) Mirengoff surmises that this is because the Party has turned so far to the left that anyone who performed the necessary duties of an actual executive, such as enforcing laws or prosecuting criminals, would automatically be disqualified in the eyes of the leftist Utopians who now make up the primary base.
In other words, the Democrats have drifted so far away from reality that to their base, having qualifications for the Presidency is now a disqualification.
A couple of other points to take from this poll are that Biden’s claim that Democrats should support him because he’s the most electable is built on a foundation of sand, and to quote Roger Miller, his poll numbers swing like a pendulum do. You should also heed my point, made before every election and always ignored by the media, that polls this far out from an election are about as trustworthy as an email promise of $10 million from a Nigerian prince.
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While polls this early aren’t reliable, some of them are more interesting and fun than others. One that deserves notice is the Iowa State Fair’s “Cast Your Kernel” poll, which lets fairgoers drop a kernel of corn into the bottle of the presidential candidate they support.
For the past couple of weeks, Democratic hopefuls have been running around the fairground more than 4H members with prize-winning pullets, trying to drum up support. But with all the corn kernels now cast, the results were 33,280 kernels cast for Republican candidates, and 33,165 cast for Democrats. Broken down by candidate, Trump had 32,375 kernels, while the top Democrat, Biden, had only 8,143. That’s remarkable, considering Trump didn’t even visit the Iowa State Fair.
It sounds corny, but in the last election, Trump beat Hillary by 56-44% in the kernel contest, and he went on to win Iowa by close to 10 points. I believe that makes the corn kernel poll substantially more accurate than most polls in 2016, and a heck of a lot easier to swallow.
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Joe Biden has released his first TV commercial to run in Iowa, and it gives a preview of how Democrats plan to run against Trump. Predictably, it doesn’t mention the economy or jobs, and it doesn’t mention the Democrats’ record of accomplishments, because…well, they want to win. Instead, it attempts to scare voters into thinking that Trump is as big a monster as he is in the nightmares they have about him every night after switching off Stephen Colbert.
The ad makes it appear that America is in the grip of a rising epidemic of white nationalism (that seems to be the term the focus groups liked best after “Russian collusion” tanked). Biden isn’t merely running for President, he’s running for Savior (thanks, but I've already got one.) The ad promises that Biden will “restore the soul of a nation battered by an erratic, vicious, bullying President” with his “strong, steady, stable leadership.”
First impression: I’m not sure that a Party whose strongest conviction is defending and promoting the slaughter of babies in (and freshly out of) the womb should be talking about how to restore the nation's soul. Second impression: I can think of several words that describe Joe Biden, but “steady” and “stable” are not among them.
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President Trump said Tuesday that among various tax cuts the White House is considering is a reduction in the payroll tax, which covers Medicare and Social Security. Trump stressed that the economy is still strong and this isn’t something immediate, but such a cut would keep more money in consumers’ pockets and help keep the economy humming.
https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-white-house-considering-payroll-tax-cut/
I can already hear the howls of protest from the left: Medicare and Social Security need all the funding they can get! Only a crazy man would suggest cutting the payroll tax! They conveniently forget that under Obama in 2011-2012, the payroll tax was cut from 6.2% to 4.2%. For a worker making $50,000 a year, that was a savings of about $83 a month. That cut was allowed to expire, so what Trump is really talking about is simply bringing back an Obama tax cut. I guess that will give the Democratic Presidential candidates one more part of Obama’s record to attack.
Incidentally, as long as I’m clearing up misconceptions about the payroll tax, I should also point out that workers don’t really pay 6.2%, they pay double that, or 12.4%. Half of it is called the “employer’s contribution,” and you are led to believe that your employer pays it. But think about it: it’s a cost of having you as an employee. You’re obviously worth that much (it’s factored into your compensation when they determine what hiring you will cost.) So if it weren’t going to the government, it could be going into your pocket. Therefore, in reality, you pay 6.2% that you see deducted from your salary on your paystub, plus the 6.2% that you don’t see because your employer pays it directly to the government instead of including it in your salary.
If you don’t think that’s true, ask some self-employed people how big a check they have to write to cover their payroll taxes. Then ask them if they could use a payroll tax cut.
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