The state of the presidential race
July 20, 2020
Mike Huckabee
I keep telling people that most public political polls are meaningless, and those taken this far from an election are less than meaningless. But the media keep hyping the “Biden’s double-digit lead” angle to make it seem as if the election were over (I find it odd that Americans have had multiple chances over the past four decades to make Joe Biden President, but only now that he’s nearing 80 have they shown the slightest interest in the prospect.)
All this has many Trump supporters worried. Combined with the relentless daily media assault on Trump, the blame heaped on him for a virus unleashed on the world by China that his China-appeasing opponents have done everything in their power to prolong, and the right-on-cue riots and racial division that Democrats desperately need to keep minorities from noticing how much worse they have fared under Democrats for the past half-century-plus, they fear Trump’s chances of reelection are slipping.
The media refuse to report what he says honestly (look at the wild misrepresentation of his Mount Rushmore speech), and he can’t hold his rallies to fire up enthusiasm. I suspect, however, that Trump supporters are a lot more enthusiastic than they’re letting on or than is being reported. A Trump bumper sticker might get your car vandalized, but once inside the voting booth, that might just make people punch that “Trump” button all the harder.
Still, the recent shake-up in Trump’s campaign organization shows that he knows some adjustments are needed. One thing that would help would be for him to get off defense and back on offense. Remind people how he actually kept his campaign promises in 2016 to bring troops home, renegotiate bad trade deals, stand up to China, make our allies keep their commitments, bring our troops home, crush ISIS and enforce immigration laws (when he wasn’t being hamstrung by a million lawsuits and out-of-control federal judges), not to target legal immigrants but to keep illegal immigration from undermining American jobs and wages. He promised to create jobs and boost economic growth, and he did.
Trump promised to cut two regulations for every new one, and as Liz Peek at Fox News notes, he’s actually cut eight. Under Obama/Biden, the Federal Register reached an all-time record 97,110 pages. They added 3,853 new rules, of which 629 were flagged as having notable effects on small businesses. Under Trump, the number of federal regulations is the lowest since the 1970s, resulting in record low unemployment in virtually every demographic group, “and in early 2019, hourly wages rose 3.4 percent over the year before, the highest rate in 10 years.”
Trump built an economy so strong, it took a virtual biological attack by China to cripple it, but even now, it’s already surging back. Trump needs to hammer the point that if you want the economy to expire like a senior citizen in a New York public nursing home, then put Joe Biden and the Democrats, with their quack remedies of huge taxes, more regulations, big government and nonexistent “green jobs” back in power.
Trump also needs to build on his great Mount Rushmore speech that’s been deliberately misconstrued, to remind us again and again that we have been bequeathed a great nation and a Constitution and economic system that are the envy of the world, and Americans of every race, creed and gender can succeed when we follow the path the Founders laid out and work together.
Kurt Schlichter has a must-read column outlining 21 second-term promises that he thinks Trump should make, to outline a positive vision the way he did in 2016. When I say it’s a must-read, that means I hope President Trump reads it, too, since there are some great ideas in here. If voters think about the nation that these ideas could lead to, and compare it to the possible Ghost-of-America’s-Future under Democrats that we can see right now in Portland, Seattle, New York City or Chicago, I can’t imagine how anyone who could pass a cognitive test would want to vote for Biden.