by: the Common Constitutionalist
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If we are to believe the polls, it would appear that Hillary Clinton has the 2016 presidential election virtually locked up.
As the election draws closers, polls historically become more accurate. The reason for this is that the companies who conduct polls have in their best interest to not only pick the winner, but to be as close as possible to predicting the margin of victory.
Professional polling companies live and die by polls, so accuracy is key to a good reputation – which leads to elite status amongst pollsters and to many more future contracts.
Early on, pollsters have a lot more leeway to get things wrong and even skew the election to the candidate they prefer. But as time becomes short, their livelihoods depend on getting it right. You will see a shift from polling just “adults,” to polling “registered” and “likely voters.”
Knowing this about polls and barring anything such as a Bradley/Wilder effect, this is Clinton’s election to lose. For those unfamiliar, the above “effect” is a circumstance when those being polled say they are voting for one candidate, due to not wanting to appear racist or sexist, or what they may perceive as peer pressure, but actually cast their ballot for another.
Yes, just saying President Hillary Clinton does lend itself to suicidal thoughts, I know.
Then I was reminded, as we should all be, that this election isn’t just about electing our next president. It’s also about Senate and Congressional races – maintaining control of one or both Houses.
Yet at this juncture, what may be more important than the national elections are the States – and it took a far-left website, VOX, to emphasize this point.
VOX political reporter, Matt Yglesias, posted a video explaining that the “Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or its supporters recognize, and it has no real plan to save itself.”
Yglesias tells us that it seems like it is the republicans and their candidate Trump who is in crisis, but this crisis is deceiving. He says that since Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the democrat party, “has been obliterated at the state level, and it has no plan to make up the gap.”
He displayed a colorized U.S. map from 2009, showing the red, blue and purple states. The 2009 map showed 20 state governments under complete democrat control – Governorships, State Houses and Senates, and many more under partial control.
Yglesias then fast forwards the map to 2016 to show something remarkable. In less than eight years under Obama, democrat control shrank to just 12 states, and adds, four of those 12 have republican Governors. This leaves only 8 states where dems are in complete control. Compare this to 23 states under complete republican control.
Mr. Yglesias laments this republican coup by enumerating the “huge, unprecedented wave of restrictions” these evil republicans in their now all-red states have foisted on the people, like new restrictions on abortion, right to work laws, redrawing of districts, “making it tougher to vote [and cheat],” and public sector downsizing and layoffs. You mean shrinking the size of government? Perish the thought.
He completes his repine by saying that when the left finally does lose a presidential election, “democrats are going to find that unlike republicans, they have almost nothing to fall back on.”
The moral of this story is that whether you vote for the Trumpster or not, it is equally, if not more important to do a little homework and vote for the most conservative state candidates available. We need to keep our eyes on the “Convention of States” prize.