Without a doubt, President Trump has a substantial challenge in his bid to win reelection. What’s amazing is that after three major body blows in the span of six months—impeachment, coronavirus, and the riots—Trump is trending in the right direction. He’s done a major reset on his messaging with the Mt. Rushmore speech, put Susie Wiles back in to run his campaign in Florida, and replaced Brad Parscale as his national campaign manager.
If you listen to the news, you would think Joe Biden has the race in the bag and should be spending the next few months measuring drapes for the Oval Office. But it’s not over—not even close.
Even with the tough times we certainly will face dealing with the economic consequences of the coronavirus, I believe that when we reach the fall elections, people will choose Trump, not Biden, to take the economy back to where it was before the pandemic.
And there’s a reason polls now show a majority of Americans want the National Guard deployed against left-wing activists as they burn our big cities and tear down statues. People are fed up with the radical Left that evidently has taken control of the Democratic Party. The silent majority of the American people want a strong leader who will restore order. The out-of-touch D.C. swamp lobbyists, deep state bureaucrats, and mainstream media are all rooting for Trump’s defeat, yet the silent majority of the American people like President Trump. They want Trump to win and they are tuning those people out.
In his February 4 State of the Union address, President Trump pointed out that “we have created 5.3 million new jobs and, importantly, added 600,000 new manufacturing jobs” while “wages are rising at the fastest pace in decades and growing for blue-collar workers.” He further noted that “nearly 5 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps.”
The Trump economy was “growing almost twice as fast” as the last stagnant days of the Obama-Biden Administration. The Trump numbers were staggering: lowest unemployment numbers in over 50 years, including the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American workers. Americans have not forgotten this. They see who wants to perpetuate their current pain. Trump reversed the course of the American economy once before. He can do it again.
Biden Cannot Deliver a Recovery
When voters finally are focused on Joe Biden’s platform—his bold embrace of reversing the Trump tax cuts, for example, and his multi-trillion-dollar spending proposals—it will be clear to them that everything he’s promising would stymie economic progress. The higher taxes Biden promises will stifle a recovering economy and squash small businesses. Biden’s radical “Green New Deal” style policies on energy will put swing-state workers out of a job and jeopardize the employment of millions of oil and gas industry workers.
On the questions of immigration and trade, voters are solidly in the “America First” camp, yet Beijing Biden is talking about granting a path to citizenship for tens of millions of illegal immigrants. When Biden finally emerges from his basement and has to pitch these policies, assuming he can even communicate them in coherent sentences, the American people will see a candidate who has sided with the rioters and socialists who want to radically transform America.
The national polling and swing-state numbers right now look bad for Trump, but guess what? They are completely irrelevant.
Polling in the summer months before an election traditionally has been wildly inaccurate. A July 1988 Gallup poll, as reported by the New York Times, had Democrat Michael Dukakis at 55 percent and Vice President George H. W. Bush at 38 percent—giving Dukakis a seemingly insurmountable lead. Yet Bush won by almost eight points four months later.
Fast forward to July 2016: CNN reported a 12 percentage-point lead by Hillary Clinton over Trump. Looking at swing states, the website FiveThirtyEight projected that Clinton had an 83.5 percent chance of winning Wisconsin in 2016 with Clinton having a 71.4 percent chance of winning the presidency. The polls reflected assumptions about a voting populace where Trump had no chance of winning swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Yet, as we know, he won all of them. Even more importantly, voter expectation polls, which are a far more reliable indicator for presidential election outcomes, currently show a dead heat between Biden and Trump.
Of course, there are issues that will move voters on the margins, such as retirement security. When Biden says that he will end shareholder capitalism, he’s talking about destroying the dreams and ending a way of life for every person who has a 401(k) plan or a pension.
Democrats Ignore the “Silent Majority”
The issue of protecting shareholder capitalism and ensuring retirement security speaks to elderly Americans. Democrats have dropped a provision in the House HEROES Act to bail out struggling multiemployer pension plans. Republicans in the Senate are trying to reform the plans to make sure we don’t just find ourselves in the same situation again in a few years but, as usual, Democrats want a pure bailout by the taxpayers. Republicans, in contrast, want reform for one of the most deadly “timebombs” ticking in the American economy.
Although the issue is complicated, the politics are not. If Senate Republicans take the lead on solving the problem of pending insolvency “of multiemployer pensions that fund the retirement of America’s truckers, retail employees, miners, manufacturers and service industry employees,” they can win some swing-state voters who want the problem solved.
Just as with entitlements, the Democrats don’t want to make tough decisions to reform these programs that are currently on track to bankrupt the nation, they merely want to pay off a slice of the American public in the hopes of buying some votes this fall.
Democrats fail to understand that the silent majority of Americans who will vote this fall are not the ones attacking the police and tearing down American history. They are the people going to work every day and keeping the economy running in spite of enormous odds. While our colleges and universities have produced generations of professional victims and a class of people chanting in the streets about wanting to turn America into a socialist nation, there are many quiet, hard-working youth who are working summer jobs or striving to be the next successful entrepreneur.
There are two Americas in every generation of Americans and the hard-working ones are the ones quietly supporting President Trump while the loud, violent, vocal minority is blocking traffic, rioting in the streets, or cheering on those who are doing these things from the comfort of their elite perches.
Polls were wrong four short years ago. As the campaign is firming up its fundamentals, I am quietly confident that Americans will vote against socialism and victimhood and for great economic policies protected by law and order.