Don't Get Cocky about the Midterms
Jan 19, 2022 18:25:36 GMT -5
Post by shalom on Jan 19, 2022 18:25:36 GMT -5
Don't Get Cocky about the Midterms
January 19, 2022
By E. Jeffrey Ludwig
We are hearing a lot of people expressing happiness at the low Biden poll numbers, and some are looking forward to a Democrat crash later this year. One conservative outlet stated, "The polling confirms voters are fed up with Mr. Biden's failures. After a year of Biden-driven decline, Americans are looking for a positive, forward-looking alternative." Perhaps they are counting their chickens before they are hatched?
This writer looked up some history about changes in control of the House and Senate and found the following:
(1) The Democrats gained the House and Senate back in 2006. President George Bush's approval ratings that year, according to Gallup, hovered in the high 30th percentile, with brief moments above 40. If Biden's approval ratings remain low throughout the year, predictions of a Republican sweep of House and Senate might materialize. However, we cannot forget that by 2006, it became clear that President Bush and his secretary of state, the revered phony Gen. Colin Powell, had presented bald-faced lies to the public about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as an excuse to invade that terrible country. So far, a lie of that magnitude has not been forthcoming from the Biden tirades and drivel. Rather, we have been blessed with merely hearing a bunch of lesser lies and distortions.
(2) In 1994, both Houses went Republican, yet in January of that year, Pres. Clinton's approval rating was at 58%, but by the two months prior to November, it had fallen to about 40%. The low presidential approval just prior to the November election suggests last-minute disaffection, but that year does show that the high level of popularity achieved by Clinton at the beginning of and for most of the year did not translate into victory at the time of the election in November. This would thus suggest caution in turning Biden's low rating now into any kind of assurance about outcomes in November.
(3) Lastly, during the year 2016, the last year of his two terms in office, Pres. Obama had an approval rating in the 50th-plus percentile, and 58% by the end of the year, but the Republicans took control of the House and the Senate as well as the presidency. Thus, there is not a one-to-one relationship between a president's January approval early in an election year and election results in November for the House or the Senate.
With this background in mind, the polls about Biden's sinking poll numbers could engender a sense of complacency among conservatives — the feeling that winning back control is "in the bag." With the COVID bogeyman as the excuse for widespread out-of-control mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, we remain in a precarious position. The democratic process is under attack. Further, in computerized voting, where voters mark their ballots in one place and then walk to another location to a computer where they insert their ballot, we see intrinsically the opportunities for fraud. This fraud, especially in densely populated areas, is something Democrats have fewer scruples about than Republicans. What is there to keep operatives at the polls from inserting hundreds or more ballots into the computers when no one is around? It takes much less time to do this "fixing" than when ballots were created by voting machines, where each voter's vote was finalized by shifting a large lever to the right. Those analog machines were much harder to tamper with than these computerized voting machines because now your vote goes in in less than a second.
Continued at link
January 19, 2022
By E. Jeffrey Ludwig
We are hearing a lot of people expressing happiness at the low Biden poll numbers, and some are looking forward to a Democrat crash later this year. One conservative outlet stated, "The polling confirms voters are fed up with Mr. Biden's failures. After a year of Biden-driven decline, Americans are looking for a positive, forward-looking alternative." Perhaps they are counting their chickens before they are hatched?
This writer looked up some history about changes in control of the House and Senate and found the following:
(1) The Democrats gained the House and Senate back in 2006. President George Bush's approval ratings that year, according to Gallup, hovered in the high 30th percentile, with brief moments above 40. If Biden's approval ratings remain low throughout the year, predictions of a Republican sweep of House and Senate might materialize. However, we cannot forget that by 2006, it became clear that President Bush and his secretary of state, the revered phony Gen. Colin Powell, had presented bald-faced lies to the public about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as an excuse to invade that terrible country. So far, a lie of that magnitude has not been forthcoming from the Biden tirades and drivel. Rather, we have been blessed with merely hearing a bunch of lesser lies and distortions.
(2) In 1994, both Houses went Republican, yet in January of that year, Pres. Clinton's approval rating was at 58%, but by the two months prior to November, it had fallen to about 40%. The low presidential approval just prior to the November election suggests last-minute disaffection, but that year does show that the high level of popularity achieved by Clinton at the beginning of and for most of the year did not translate into victory at the time of the election in November. This would thus suggest caution in turning Biden's low rating now into any kind of assurance about outcomes in November.
(3) Lastly, during the year 2016, the last year of his two terms in office, Pres. Obama had an approval rating in the 50th-plus percentile, and 58% by the end of the year, but the Republicans took control of the House and the Senate as well as the presidency. Thus, there is not a one-to-one relationship between a president's January approval early in an election year and election results in November for the House or the Senate.
With this background in mind, the polls about Biden's sinking poll numbers could engender a sense of complacency among conservatives — the feeling that winning back control is "in the bag." With the COVID bogeyman as the excuse for widespread out-of-control mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, we remain in a precarious position. The democratic process is under attack. Further, in computerized voting, where voters mark their ballots in one place and then walk to another location to a computer where they insert their ballot, we see intrinsically the opportunities for fraud. This fraud, especially in densely populated areas, is something Democrats have fewer scruples about than Republicans. What is there to keep operatives at the polls from inserting hundreds or more ballots into the computers when no one is around? It takes much less time to do this "fixing" than when ballots were created by voting machines, where each voter's vote was finalized by shifting a large lever to the right. Those analog machines were much harder to tamper with than these computerized voting machines because now your vote goes in in less than a second.
Continued at link