We are already being inundated with opinion polls on all the election races going on and this blizzard will likely intensfty as we get closer to November. In order to help us keep a grip on reality, Harry Enten provides a list of things to bear in mind confronted by poll numbers. I have given just the headers but Enten’s post explains the rationale for each.
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So on Wednesday we had Donald Trump going to Mexico and meeting with their president Enrique Pena Nieto. Following it, he lavishly praised the Mexican people and said that the two had a cordial discussion, and that they did not discuss the wall or who would pay for it (something that the Mexican president later contradicted), suggesting to observers that he was going to change his approach on the divisive issue of immigration.
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In a previous post, I wrote about how voter volatility has dropped sharply beginning with the 1996 elections, resulting in much greater stability in voter patterns. This has resulted in the cementing of party preferences in about 80% of the states leading to a semi-permanent red state-blue state map of the US, with just a handful of about 10 states (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin being the largest of this small group) considered swing states whose outcome is now considered to be still up for grabs.
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The emergency appeal by North Carolina’s governor to the US Supreme Court to reinstate the restrictive voting rights ID law that was overturned by the Appeals Court of the Fourth Circuit was rebuffed today when the court voted 4-4 against doing so.
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Readers may have heard that Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, was one of those people whose homes were flooded by the torrential rains that fell on Louisiana and flooded parts of Baton Rouge and other areas. The FRC is one of those evangelical organizations that have an anti-LGBT mission, though like many Christian groups, they claim to “love the sinner and hate the sin”.
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Needless to say that I was startled to read in the news that Donald Trump would be going to Mexico today to meet with that nation’s president Enrique Pena Nieto, prior to his much publicized speech on immigration in Arizona later in the day. News reports say that the invitation came from Nieto and that Trump would be accompanied by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Alabama senator Jeff Sessions.
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Discussions of the value of trade agreements have been quite prominent in the current election campaign. Supporters of the neoliberal economic model are strong advocates of so-called ‘free trade’, extolling the benefits they claim it provides, while critics have said that the only ones who really benefit are the oligarchs who get greater freedom to move capital and production around the globe is pursuance of greater profits, leaving behind abandoned workers.
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There is a war being waged against public schools. There are people actively seeking to make them fail or at least look as if they are failing. This is a strong statement that I substantiate in my book The Achievement Gap in U.S. Education: Canaries in the Mine published back in 2005.
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One of the things that candidates for office have to be cautious of is thinking that the enthusiastic response they get at large rallies is a sign of widespread overwhelming support for them and their policies. The people who attend rallies tend to be the die-hard fans and not representative of the population at large. And yet, it must be exhilarating to have large numbers of people cheer you on and the temptation can be irresistible to say things that make them respond even more enthusiastically.
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