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There is no energy or enthusiasm for a Joe Biden presidency in North Carolina, or anywhere else for that matter. No one can say off the top of their head what Joe Biden would do as president. He certainly does not convey a lot of confidence in having him as the next commander-in-chief when he has to read responses to pre-screened questions from his notes or a teleprompter.
This election is solely about President Donald J. Trump. You either love him or hate him. The small percentage of truly independent swing voters is going to be swayed by his message on law and order and economic prosperity or not; and they will determine if he wins North Carolina or not.
Democratic strategists said long ago that the only chance they had to win North Carolina was to nominate a moderate like Joe Biden who would not scare off independent swing voters. However, his “moderation” is being brought into question because of his adoption of the socialist Bernie Sanders’ agenda almost lock, stock and barrel, which tends to scare off such voters.
History is not on Joe Biden’s side. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won N.C. handily over a Watergate-frazzled President Gerald Ford. The only Democrat to win North Carolina since then was Barack Obama in 2008 who won by only 14,000 votes over John McCain and his forgettable “Country First” campaign. President Obama, the most attractive and charismatic Democrat to run for the White House since JFK in 1960, lost N.C. by close to 100,000 votes during his re-election campaign of 2012 to the almost-equally forgettable campaign of Mitt Romney. Bill Clinton lost to President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996. His wife, Hillary Clinton, lost to Trump in 2016 by 177,000 votes.
In order to win North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes, Joe Biden has to: A) be more charismatic than Barack Obama ever was (which is impossible); B) be more personable than Bill Clinton (which is impossible); C) have more money to spend than Obama, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton combined (which is possible) and D) have a more robust voter turnout machine than Obama, the consummate “community organizer” (again which is impossible).
Joe Biden is going to have to throw the long ball and thread the eye of a needle to a receiver in the corner of the endzone (to mix a few metaphors) to win North Carolina. He is going to need a massive turnout of African-American voters that far exceeds the 19.7% of the final electorate of black voters who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But if black turnout explodes and President Trump gets more than the 8% of the black vote than he got in 2016, say 10-12%, any advantage Biden may have gotten from high black turnout may be negated or even diminished.
Second, Biden is going to have to do a lot better among white voters than Hillary did in 2016. Biden has a 31% approval rating from white voters which is behind the very low 32% approval of white voters of Hillary Clinton.
There are no prominent third-party candidates expected to drain off 4% of the votes in North Carolina as Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein did in 2016. That could be as many as 200,000 votes that will either stay at home or force themselves to vote for either Trump or Biden. 100% of the Johnson/Stein 2016 vote will not go to either candidate.
And then there is the “enthusiasm gap.” The best get-out-the-vote machine is enthusiasm for a candidate, which is very hard to measure by pollsters. When registered voters who voted in the last four elections were asked, on a scale of 1-to-10, their commitment to vote, the number of 10s recorded for Trump out-numbered those 10s recorded for Biden by a 10-to-1 margin.
Joe Biden might slip through and defy the odds and history to win North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes on Nov. 3. But it all depends on turnout, not any poll. It always has.
(first published in North State Journal 9/16/20)"I Can't Wait to Lead Antifa! |
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, progressive liberals and the media — but I repeat myself — started to freak out about “fascism” coming to America.
They were right to be worried. It did happen…but it came from the left, not the right.
They said Donald Trump would be the reincarnation of “Il Duce,” or “The Leader,” Benito Mussolini, fascist strongman of Italy before and during World War II. He joined forces with another madman, Adolf Hitler, to wreak death and destruction across Europe before American soldiers landed at Normandy to free millions from their insane megalomania.
Mussolini was machine-gunned to death on April 28, 1945, by the same Italian people he promised to help but led into disaster. His body was spit upon and mutilated before being hung downward by his feet in the Piazza Loreto in Milan.
So far, so good for us in America since 2016. President Trump is no Benito Mussolini. Or Adolf Hitler. He is pulling troops out of hotspots around the globe, not sending goose-stepping American soldiers into harm’s way.
“Fascism” comes from the Latin word fasces which was a symbol of a Roman magistrate’s authority depicted by wooden rods around an ax. Fascist governments believe in the power of concentrated authority in the hands of elites (namely themselves) who use armed force to enact their will on innocent citizens.
Fascists disregard and ignore democratic principles when it suits them. They use intimidation tactics to censor political and cultural opponents. They subordinate individual rights and personal freedoms, ostensibly “for the good of the society,” which of course is determined only by the strongman themselves.
In other words, they are bullies who rule by brute physical force, not by reason, logic or the law — just like the antifa terrorists American voters see every night on the news in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago and New York City.
The American people — black, white, latino, old, young, liberal, moderate and conservative — all know these riots were not caused by President Trump or the US military but by an anarchist militant army from the left, dead-set upon the destruction of America as we know it today.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Antifa is democracy.” George Orwell would be so proud.
Late on Election Night, 2016, Hillary Clinton refused to accept the results of an election or gracefully concede to President-elect Trump, as has been historical tradition even in close elections such as Nixon’s loss to JFK in 1960. In the early morning following her defeat, the seeds of blaming her loss on “Russian Collusion” and encouraging “The Resistance” to oppose the Trump Administration at every turn were planted and the past four years have been as tumultuous as any term in White House history.
Willful disregard for democratic principles is a hallmark of fascist movements. When fascists don’t get their way according to the rules, in this case, the US Constitution, they say, “Destroy the rules!”, not “How can we win the next time playing by the rules?”
Fascists love to restrict free speech and public discourse because it threatens their misguided dangerous agendas. Conservative speakers have been banned from speaking on college campuses for a decade now. If liberals think conservative ideas are so stupid, why not let them speak and prove their ignorance in public?
The “cancel culture” movement has gotten to the point where if anyone dares to say anything that disagrees with BLM or antifa, including standing for the American flag and singing the national anthem, Joe Biden and left-wing Progressives go into full attack mode, demanding their resignation or firing and being sent into permanent exile.
Joe Biden can’t even say antifa and BLM are responsible for this violence due to the risk of losing progressive left-wing support in his campaign for the White House. How twisted is that?
Fascists such as Mussolini espoused extreme nationalistic jargon designed to rally the populace around the preservation of the Motherland. In an oddly perverse way, antifa from the left uses extreme anti-nationalistic jargon to destroy the Motherland. They want the complete annihilation of America as we know it, and no Democratic leader takes them to task for it in public.
When big city mayors and governors are given the sole power to make decisions, they can make any decision they want and declare that it is “for the good of the society” without a lot of explanation. Many voters are still scratching their heads over lockdown orders that prevented them from attending worship services and going to the gym at the same time they could go to the local Walmart and ABC store.
Americans will have the chance to renounce fascism on Nov. 3. The only way to crush it is to turn out heavily at the polls and vote against every left-wing politician who has supported such violence, either in word and deed or by their silence since 2016.
(first published in North State Journal 9/9/20)