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Karl Misinterprets Polls; Voters Do Want Trump

These days, I am often plagued by the nagging sense that I really don’t understand the dynamics of contemporary politics. It pains to admit that it often comes down to a simple matter of logic, as in

If X, then not-Y.  

X.

Ergo?

If you said, “Not-Y” then you and I are on the same page. That was my conclusion, too.

But I fear we might be wrong. My old friend Karl Rove just wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal arguing that “Voters Want Anyone but Trump or Biden.”

“Voters” want this, said Karl, explaining that “Neither looks good in the latest polls.” Both parties should consider alternatives for the 2024 presidential election.”

It’s certainly possible that Karl has access to more recondite polls than I do, though the ones he cites are the ones we all know—the recent New York Times/Siena  poll, for example, which has the agita-inducing news that Trump leads Biden in five of 6 swing states, Nevada (+10), Arizona (+5), Michigan (+5), Georgia (+6) , and Pennsylvania (+4). The poll had Biden ahead of Trump in Wisconsin, but only by 2 points.

Who was polled to arrive at those numbers? Voters.

Last week saw the third (can we hope that it will be the last?) Republican debate. It took place in Miami. Some 40 percent fewer people tuned in to watch the five contenders than had tuned into to the first GOP debate this summer. Just down the street, in Hialeah, Florida, Donald Trump held a barn-burner of a rally at which some 15,000 people—most of them voters—showed up, many waiting for hours to gain access to Milander Park where the rally took place.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Governor of Arkansas, made headlines by endorsing her former boss at the rally and as I write, the most recent (November 9) RealClearPolitics summary of GOP polls has Tump at 60, Ron DeSantis at 13, Nikki Haley at 5.

What do such polls measure? Some version of voter sentiment, often skewed or massaged in such a way as to cater to the pollsters’ preferences.

And speaking of pollsters’ preferences, what about Nikki Haley? She appears to be something like the final cause of Karl Rove’s column, the end or telos after which it hankers.  After telling us that “voters”—though it’s not clear which voters he has in mind—want a “fresh face,” Karl writes that “former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley beats Mr. Biden in all six battlegrounds now. In four states, her margins are wider than Mr. Trump’s.”

So is she the “fresh face” he has in mind?  Or is she just, as Vivek Ramaswamy said at the GOP debate, a tired old neocon, “Dick Cheney in 3-inch heels?”

I conclude that there is something to that charge because The Babylon Bee thought it current enough to run with. “Nikki Haley Stumped,” their headline ran, “When Debate Moderator Asks Her To List Some Countries She Wouldn’t Invade.” Ha, ha, ha. The Bee continued the fun: “‘I don’t understand the question,’ a bewildered Haley said in response. ‘You’re asking me about countries to not invade? Why would there be any countries I wouldn’t want to invade? Is this a trick question?.’”  Ha, as I say, ha.

Well, columns are not written under oath, and I suspect that there is an explanation for the burden of Karl Rove’s column that can save us the embarrassment of that version of modus ponens with which we began. For one thing, polls often have their meaning, at least in part, in the eye or heart of the beholder. People see in them what they want to see. So it is not surprising that Karl, who does not like Donald Trump, interprets a suite of polls most of us understand as encouraging for Donald Trump as encouraging for his candidate for a “fresh face,” Nikki Haley.

And then there is the issue of voters. The thousands of voters at Trump’s rally, the millions that tuned in to watch it on line, find in Trump’s countenance the freshness they desire. But if you step back and understand “voters” to mean people who agree with Karl Rove about Donald Trump then the world comes back into focus. By “voters,” you see, he didn’t mean “voters.”  He meant something like what Rabbit, in Winnie-the-Pooh, meant when he spoke of his “friends and relations.”

Perhaps this is the place to acknowledge that none of us knows what is going to happen in the 2024 election. There are many, many variables which have yet to be assigned a value. A lot could happen, to the candidates, in the country, in the world. The burden of Karl Rove’s column is less factual than emotional. That is, it was meant less to inform than to cajole. It was meant to instill doubt about Donald Trump, fear about the course of the election, anxiety about the fate of his home team, the GOP. I am not sure it succeeds. It’s partly because the polls he adduces speak with different voices to different people. And it’s partly because those “voters” he alludes to just won’t line up in the queue he has prepared for them.

Then there are all sorts of pesky little developments. The news, for example, that Robert Bigelow, one of Ron DeSantis’s most prominent supporters, has withdrawn his countenance from DeSantis and is speaking kindly about Trump. He has yet to make a financial commitment for the very understandable reason that Trump is plagued by “kangaroo court” problems that could possibly land him in jail.

I suspect that eventually Bigelow will decide to support Trump, just as Home Depot Founder Bernie Marcus has decided to do.  In a remarkable column for RealClearPolitics called “High Stakes and a Simple Choice,” Marcus, 94, explained that he was tired of politics and had intended to sit out on this election cycle. But the stakes were just too high, he decided. “We cannot,” he wrote, “let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren.”

Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments. There are rarely consequences for the wrongdoers because George Soros-elected prosecutors across America refuse to prosecute them.

Karl Rove might agree with all that. The problem comes with the “simple choice” that Marcus outlines. “Let’s face it,” he writes, “Donald Trump is going to win the nomination.” Republicans who have the good of the country at heart “should be doing all you can to ensure his winning the general election.”

Marcus goes on officially to endorse Trump. His reasoning is interesting, not least in the context of what Karl Rove says about the voters. “I endorse him not only because he has the best chance of winning the general election but because he is the best person to take on and dismantle the administrative state that is strangling America.”

Then there is the rest of the world. We all know that Marcus is right when he notes that, “The new war in the Middle East will present great challenges for the free world for some time, especially in keeping other terrorist groups or nations out of the conflict.” Who is best equipped to face this challenge?

Marcus argues that Donald Trump is. After all, in his first term, Trump displayed “the judgment, strength, decisiveness, and courage” that brought peace to the Middle East, partly by ridding the world of creeps like Qasem Soleimani, partly by fostering world historical diplomatic initiatives like the Abraham Accords. Would Putin have invaded Ukraine on Trump’s watch? Would Hamas have invaded Israel? We cannot know for sure. But we do know that neither happened when Trump was president. Karl Rove tells us that “the voters” want a fresh face. I suspect that Bernie Marcus may be closer to the mark when he says that they want a seasoned and successful hand on the tiller.

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Notable Replies

  1. People like Rove don’t understand modern politics because now elections are decided by the number of votes both sides can get counted instead of by the number of voters who can be actually persuaded on a candidate or an issue. Vote by mail has destroyed the secret ballot thereby undermining trust in the legitimacy of the vote totals. Polls are even more ridiculous because none can account for fraud. And then there are the errors in the counting software like the one in Antrim County, MI. The unaudited issue is how many other undiscovered software problems altered the vote totals sufficiently to tip the results in several battleground States. A couple of small glitches in known Democrat strongholds like Fulton County, GA would not have raised suspicions but changed 6500 votes to Biden and determined the GA results.

  2. Avatar for Alecto Alecto says:

    I do not support accusations of guilt by association, but in the case of Karl Rove, not only will I make an exception, but urge others to dismiss him and everything he says or writes because of his association with the Bush cartel. Lordy! Haven’t we seen enough of the damage those “people” do to their own? Very recently, Rove was involved in trying to take down Ken Paxton in Texas. Rove and those like him are a virus in the Republican Party. We need anti-viral to administer to voters who would even read his schlock! Nefarious doesn’t begin to describe him. He’s the bubonic plague in the Republican Party.

  3. I think Mr. Kimball is on to something here. I’ve seen quite a few anti-Trump pundits like Rove or Ryan and Trump hating private individuals put out the need to nominate someone other than Trump to attract voters needed to win the general election. But if they expand deeper on this idea the “voters” are always suburban PMC types, Soccer Moms, etc. You know, people from the pre-Trump coalition.

    Then there’s the other side of the coin. When considering people Trump brought into the mix their attitude ranges from a grudging willingness to toss them scraps if they behave (working class folks) to arguments it’s fine to jettison them because they’ll never vote GOP en masse (minorities).

    I think I’m going to try to push this matter farther next time I get jumped by a Never Trumper.

  4. Call me the grumpy curmudgeon, or the irascible contrarian, but I still say elections no longer matter as voting no longer matters. Sure, Trump might be leading in the polls, but polls don’t elect politicians. As the results of 2020 and 2022 clearly indicate, voters don’t elect anybody, but those who count (or stuff ballot boxes) win elections.

    Back in 2022 Michael Anton wrote what I think is a prescient column and one that will turn out to be prophetic. Bottom line; there is no way the Deep State / Ruling Class et al will allow PDJT to win the White House for the THIRD* time.

    (*As we all know, Joe Biden did NOT receive 80 million votes. Post election analysis and the mountain of revelations about the systemic, industrial-grade 2020 election fraud indicates his actual popular vote total was in the neighborhood of 63 million–10 million less that Donald Trump)

  5. Indeed, this is the ‘Trump card’ (pardon to the pun) that concerns me most. The Dems were just caught red-handed in Bridgeport CT stuffing ballot boxes en masse, the entire special election was thrown out by a judge. This is commonplace on the Left/Dem side now, and was long before the 2020 election. They just focus on mail-in votes more now rather than other techniques to steal elections.

    Another way of saying this is that many conservatives speak as though that movies 2000 Mules doesn’t exist. I was amazed by the idiotic ‘tech critiques’ offered to try and debunk the movie, all incorrect and silly btw. Its evidence is rock solid, it’s a smoking gun. But I guess we don’t really care about election fraud on the Right in a meaningful way? Fyi, even some of the ‘crazy’ stuff the pillow guy had on the election had some truth to it. From pure statistical analysis POV, a Benford analysis shows a strong signal of Dem fraud in the data, but again, you just won’t hear any conservative speaking about this much.

    They run over us and then put it in reverse and back up over us to run us over again, but we still don’t seem to get what these animals are doing politically. It’s war - and we are writing effing blogs…

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