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The 2024 election is just a few weeks away.  This means we are nearing the end of election propaganda, commercials, gaslighting, and talking heads offering their biased opinions on anything that might give their candidate an edge.  That goes for me, too.

The turmoil caused by the Democrat coup against the Artful Dodger, Joe Biden, and the RFK Jr. endorsement of Donald Trump has mostly passed.

My take on Kamala Harris is she is an attractive, well-credentialed woman with a bubbly, outgoing personality.  She appears to have used her personality to attract the attention of powerful Democrat politicians, who have been instrumental in helping her win elections.

Otherwise, she seems to be short on abilities.  Despite having a law degree, she is famous for uttering incomprehensible word salads and appears incapable of explaining simple concepts.  In a now-famous interview where she was asked how she would lower prices for Americans, her response was to riff about being a middle-class kid.  Uh, right.  Nothing to see there.

Despite all of this, numerous polls have Harris ahead nationally and in several of the battleground states.  The Real Clear Politics national average has her ahead by 2 points.

As I mentioned in a previous post, much of the Harris polling lead is contrived.  There are two reasons for this, one intentional and the other unintentional.  Most polling organizations are tied to either colleges or the liberal news media.  Like most left-wingers, they lean toward Kamala and may even believe Trump is Hitler.  Wouldn’t you oversample Democrats or ghost a poll to help elect Kamala or defeat Hitler?

The unintentional oversampling is mainly due to non-response bias produced by societal and technical changes.  This means liberals are more likely to be included in polls than conservatives because conservatives get skipped over or elect not to participate.  For example, online polling favors people who are online.  This is mainly younger voters, who tend to be more liberal.

On the social side, many left-wingers regard working-class folks and Trump supporters as evil or stupid, or both.  Even before the election of Biden and Harris in 2020, this attitude had infiltrated government agencies, the school systems via the teacher’s unions, and more.  If you don’t agree with the left’s climate agenda, their LGBTQ agenda, the teacher’s unions, or have a problem with illegal immigration, you could be investigated by the FBI as a domestic terrorist.  Under those circumstances, why risk answering a poll?

In the 2020 election, the average poll overestimated the Democrat vote by roughly 4%.  Later, a group of polling companies tried to discover why this happened.  They did a monthslong survey in Wisconsin to find conservative voters and determine how they differed from those polled using standard polling techniques.  Their conclusion was that low-propensity conservative voters were there.  Unfortunately, the type of in-depth polling required to include them could not be deployed during an election because of the time, money, and effort involved.

There are other reasons to believe there are more Trump voters out there than are being polled.  According to Gallup, Republicans have a 3% party identification and registration advantage nationwide.  This is the first such advantage Republicans have held since before 1992.  It is unclear if pollsters are including this data in their election models.

Not to mock Kamala, but I grew up in a blue-collar union household.  My father, both of my grandfathers, and most of my uncles were union members.  So, I have a good idea of what goes on behind the union curtains.  Except for various police unions, the Teamsters, and maybe one or two others, the unions have all endorsed Kamala.  Despite that, there are rumblings that union members may vote for Trump in significant numbers.  Union leaders usually don’t like it when their membership deviates from official union positions, and they have ways of enforcing discipline.  The point is, if you are a union member and intend to vote for Trump, chances are you will not shout it from the rooftops or mention it in a poll.

Finally, there is this little gem that no one is talking about.  A Scripps/Ipsos poll from September 15 found that 54% of respondents were in favor of mass deportations of illegal immigrants.  Since polls are intentionally or unintentionally oversampling liberals, that number could be north of 55% and maybe as high as 60%.  Okay, so what?

Well, there seems to be a pattern here.  If you look at the issues voters are concerned about, crime and immigration are usually near the top.  For example, in the Fox News poll from September 18, crime and immigration were chosen by 26% and 32%, respectively, with high prices at 39%.  In the Scripps poll, it is 25% and 39%, with inflation highest at 59%.  In a Tipp poll from early September, those numbers were 16% and 37%, with the economy leading at 42%.  Yes, I know the polling methodologies differ, so I am comparing apples to oranges.  Sorry.

However, I strongly suspect those two issues are linked because it is difficult to discuss one without referencing the other.  On Friday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed there are presently over 662,000 convicted criminal illegals living in the United States.  This includes more than 13,000 convicted of homicide and over 15,000 convicted of sexual assault.  The horrifying part is ICE doesn’t know where these people are.  My point is both of these topics combined would likely be the most critical issue in the election.

Biden claimed he would dismantle Trump’s immigration policies in 2020.  But I doubt anyone could have imagined ten million people crossing our borders in less than four years.  These people are being transported, housed, fed, and given medical care at our expense.  They are in almost every city and town from coast to coast and within spitting distance of every Middlesex village and farm to borrow a line.  This issue is unpopular, and Kamala, as Biden’s Border Czar, is right in the middle.

If you think this is a nothing burger, watch a Trump rally.  I have watched quite a few online, not because I want to hear Trump wander off on tangents.  I watch them because I want to see and hear the crowd’s reaction to what he says.  Without fail, the line that gets the most visceral reaction and the loudest roar from people everywhere is when he says there will be mass deportations.

I am sure liberals will say that is due to all of those racist Republicans at Trump rallies.  However, according to the poll, deportations are favored by 58% of independents and 25% of Democrats.

At this point, I firmly believe the 2024 election is going to pivot on immigration/crime because many of our citizens are angry about the first and fear the second.  If Trump wins the national popular vote or comes close to a tie, something that may be possible, he will likely win the battleground states and the election.  He may have just enough silent votes to do it.

Trump

Image: The Last Refuge, with permission.