Like it or not I get about five calls a day from people telling me the election is over.
Most of them come from Democrats who seem to be unnecessarily worried about Joe Biden and his chances for re-election. I ask them to make believe we are back in high school and looking at a blank chalkboard. That board will not have any important information to ponder before July 1.
Forget about the polls. I still remember the headline in 2018 which screamed, “Is Barack Obama Toast?.” I know that all of the current polls, including the fake ones say that Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden. Ignore them if you can. There are lots of things cooking in the political oven that won’t be ready for consumption for quite a few months.
First of all, former President Trump has to officially be the party’s candidate. That is almost a given, even if Nikki Haley makes a last-minute surge in the polls.
There is no Republican Party. It died in 2016 when Mr. Trump won his party’s nomination. Trump will be the candidate of his party and his actions or craziness will get even worse after Super Tuesday, when he locks up his party’s support for 2024.
To add to the current confusion, Nikki Haley will get some good news in other polls, but it will be impossible for her to overcome Trump’s lead.
Trump’s party is not ready to dump its leader for the former South Carolina governor. The next question is whether President Biden definitely becomes his party’s candidate?
Right now it looks like a sure thing, but there is really no such thing in politics. Biden could run into a series of bad luck developments that could change his decision to run. We will only know whether he is his party’s candidate, when he clinches the nomination.
Assuming Trump is the candidate, everyone including partisans in his party, all agree that Trump is his own worst enemy.
Each day he makes some crazy announcement that could impact on how his voters and the more moderate voters think.
One of his latest words of wisdom was his wish that the “economy would crash.” He expressed the desire not to be the next “Herbert Hoover”, but he is talking doom and gloom, praying for such a collapse.
Now comes the big if. Currently, Special Counsel Jack Smith is anticipating a March 4 trial on the Jan. 6 insurrection charges.
It is not a complex case like the Georgia election tampering case or the Mar-a-Lago document case. There is a possibility that the March date could be postponed, but it could commence in either April or May.
One of the first key witnesses in the Jan.6 trial would be Trump’s former chief of staff. Mark Meadows alone could destroy Trump.
What happens if Trump is convicted in the insurrection case? Polls taken on that subject show that many Republicans now committed to Trump, would consider withdrawing their support and looking for another option.
A shift of a few percentage points could turn the election upside down and give President Biden a landslide victory. That possibility is what is behind Trump’s everyday efforts to postpone any trial until after the election.
Each and every day one of Trump’s lawyers get out of bed hoping to invite a new procedure that could delay any trial until after November.
There is one facet to the presidential elections that hasn’t been mentioned lately. It is the Supreme Court.
That court has a number of cases that could have a dramatic impact on the election. The biggest one that could be a bombshell is the one which could decide whether a birth control pill, approved by the FDA, is illegal. More than half of America’s women take that pill and if the court rules against it, the election would have been decided.
So keep that chalkboard blank, because so much is yet to happen. Scrap the polls and ignore the media mavens. Start filling in real information and hard facts somewhere around July 1 when the crystal ball starts to get a little clearer.
