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ELECTIONS

TIPP Poll: Six Straight Presidential Wins Called With Unmatched Accuracy

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/03/tipp-poll-six-straight-presidential-wins-called-with-unmatched-accuracy/

Editor’s note: For the past several years, Issues & Insights has worked with TIPP on a monthly poll, the results of which we published each week. This week, TIPP celebrated its unbroken streak of being the most accurate presidential pollster since 2004. The article below has been reprinted with permission. For more information about TIPP, click here. To read our I&I/TIPP poll reports, click here.

We are proud to share our 2024 performance with our readers. The TIPP Poll is the only national poll to correctly identify the winners of the last six presidential elections. By various measures, it consistently ranks as the most accurate. Here, we provide the data to substantiate this claim.

The Fumes of the 2024 Election The last great hope to stop the madness. by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-fumes-of-the-2024-election/

Three weeks after the election and the fallout from it, we are starting to appreciate the clarity of the vote. It explains much of the present, the past, and the future.

Consider the following:

1. Even Donald Trump’s enemies are beginning, albeit sheepishly and begrudgingly, to concede he proved indestructible in a way they never imagined. After failed collusion hoaxes, laptop disinformation ruses, the 2020 mail-in ballot ambush, two impeachments, the attempt at ballot removal, five criminal and civil lawfare cases coordinated by the White House, 95% negative media coverage, and $5 billion in 2020 and 2024 political campaign hit ads and vituperation, and two assassinations, the Left failed to defeat him, to bankrupt him, to jail him, and to destroy him.

And now like an exasperated Wile E. Coyote, they have developed a bizarre mixture of fear and respect, venomous though it is, for the unstoppable beep-beep Roadrunner Trump.

2. For all the recent spin, post-election Kamala Harris is going nowhere but to a Dukakis-like retirement. She proved the worst Democratic candidate since the 1972 catastrophe of George McGovern (who was a sincere person, and a decorated WWII B-24 combat bomber pilot).

She will make no Trump 2021-4 comeback, no election victory in 2028, as either president or California governor. Her moneybags donors are exasperated that she and her PACs blew $1.5 billion of their money in little more than a 100-day campaign—while paying for private jets, concerts, and the likes of Al Sharpton, Beyonce, Oprah, etc. to endorse/interview her.

She ran five points behind Joe Biden four years earlier in California. The widely disliked Adam Schiff outperformed Harris this year in his preordained California Senate race. If she runs either for president or governor, she will have to explain in leftwing primaries or in a leftwing state her three-month metamorphosis to a fracker, a crime-fighter, a border hawk, a deporter—or revert back to her true 40-year leftwing persona, claiming temporary flip-flop amnesia in 2024.

If Harris couldn’t win, maybe Democrats should have nominated someone else By W. James Antle III

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/presidential/3239705/democrats-should-have-nominated-someone-else-not-kamala-harris/

The leaders of Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign are starting to acknowledge that the fundamentals of the 2024 race for the White House favored President-elect Donald Trump all along.

Joy and hope were no match for dissatisfaction with the economy, the direction of the country, and incumbent parties across the globe, dooming the Democrats earlier this month and paving the way for Trump’s return to the Oval Office.

“The headwinds were just too great for us to overcome, especially in 107 days,” Harris campaign Chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon told the Washington Post in a representative postmortem. “But we came very close to what we anticipated, both in terms of turnout and in terms of support.”

What they were unable to do, however, was win a single battleground state or the popular vote even after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.

Harris was undoubtedly dealt a bad hand. She was also an incredibly risk-averse candidate, while her opponent, who faced the prospect of incarceration if defeated, aggressively sought out new media opportunities to target infrequent voters. She had no compelling answer to how she would be different from Biden, despite that being the central question of the campaign, even though she was serving as vice president under an octogenarian who, from 2019 to 2023, had seriously considered only serving a single term.

Many explanations of the election outcome that seek to absolve Harris of responsibility for her defeat subtly make the case against her candidacy in the first place. As Biden’s vice president, she would have to do more than other Democrats to distance herself from the incumbent administration, if it could be done at all.

‘The Democrats are now the party of the rich’ John R MacArthur on how the Democratic Party betrayed the working class.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/18/the-democrats-are-now-the-party-of-the-rich/

In the US presidential election, the Democrats revealed their true colours. Candidate Kamala Harris spent her campaign espousing wispy platitudes and chasing celebrity endorsements, while President Joe Biden smeared half the electorate as ‘garbage’. The Democratic Party’s transformation from the party of the people to the party of the woke elites seemed all but complete, and it delivered a humiliating electoral defeat to the populist Donald Trump.

John R MacArthur joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the Democrats’ self-immolation. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Were you surprised at Donald Trump’s victory?

John R MacArthur: I wasn’t surprised that he won, but I was surprised he won the popular vote. I thought it would be closer. It just shows how weak the Democratic Party now is in so many respects. Hillary Clinton, who was a terrible candidate with a lot of baggage, still won the popular vote against Trump in 2016. For Harris to lose the popular vote speaks to a degradation beyond anything even I had thought possible.

The reason the Democrats lost was articulated by critics like Bernie Sanders, who wrote recently that the Democrats have become the party of the rich, not the working class. He says they have to make up their minds whose side they’re on.

The Democrats made up their minds a long time ago. They made up their minds in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton signed free-trade deals such as NAFTA and normalised trade relations with China. These decisions sent millions of manufacturing jobs from the US to countries like Mexico and China.

This election demonstrated the complete inversion of American politics. Harris outraised Trump three-to-one, and it didn’t come in small contributions. More than half of the people with a family income under $100,000 a year voted for Trump. Harris won a majority of the people with a family income above $100,000. There’s been a total inversion of what we used to think of as the New Deal coalition.

O’Neill: Would you say that Trump won this or that the Democrats lost it?

MacArthur: Trump’s popular vote total is almost exactly the same as it was four years ago. It’s not a MAGA landslide. Harris received 11million fewer votes than Biden in 2020. Where did those 11million voters go? Some went to Trump, but most of them presumably just didn’t vote.

We have to examine why they didn’t vote Democrat. One of the things that comes to mind is inflation, which the Democrats didn’t address, other than keeping interest rates high. One of Biden’s first acts was to expand the child tax credit, which literally cut the child poverty rate nearly in half. But they didn’t do anything else to help the poor cope with higher food prices. So the Democrats hadn’t taken care of the poor. They didn’t give them a reason to vote Democrat.

There are also a lot of working-class people who are still angry about NAFTA. I know lots of union members who say that it was nice of Biden to join the picket line, but it was too late. They will never vote for the Democratic Party again.

Then the party imposed Harris on the electorate. There was no primary and there had been no vetting. The Democratic Party told people they should be happy because she’s black and she’s a woman. Everybody resented that. Black people resented it. White people resented it. Deep down, nobody wants to vote for someone because of what colour or sex they are.

You Don’t Have to Go Away Mad, Bob Casey — Just Go Away Jeff Blehar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/you-dont-have-to-go-away-mad-bob-casey-just-go-away/

The Pennsylvania supreme court has spoken — spoken again, spoken with exasperation, spoken for the third time during the election cycle — and has finally lowered the boom on Senator Bob Casey Jr.’s futile attempts to fight his loss to Dave McCormick in the 2024 Pennsylvania Senate election.

As most here are already well aware, Casey lost narrowly to McCormick on November 5, but rather than concede the race, he instead hired Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias to try to squeeze a victory out of electorally impossible math. Elias’s proposed workaround? Cheat! Yes, just violate the law and dare someone to stop them. Let’s hope that, after today, they have finally been stopped.

McCormick currently leads Casey by around 17,000 votes, with nearly all valid ballots counted. All that remains to be counted are invalid ballots — those rejected for facial invalidity in one way or another, most often for missing signatures or missing date marks. Elias’s strategy has been to enjoin the Democratic commissioners of the Boards of Elections in Centre, Montgomery, Bucks, and Philadelphia Counties (all heavily Democratic strongholds except for Bucks, which was fought to a draw this year) to continue counting undated late-arriving mail ballots.

The problem is that Pennsylvania law and case law specifically stipulate that such ballots are invalid. The matter had already been litigated before the state supreme court twice before Election Day — and both times the court insisted that no, the law meant exactly what it said: Undated absentee or mail ballots are presumptively invalid.

How America’s Accurate Election Polls Were Covered Up The Real Clear Politics National Average was removed by Wikipedia before the election and the New York Times denounced its failure to skew data. A solution to the “mystery” of crappy polling? Matt Taibbi

https://www.racket.news/p/how-americas-accurate-election-polls

John McIntyre couldn’t believe it. The publisher of the Real Clear Polling National Average, America’s first presidential poll aggregator, woke on October 31st to see his product denounced in the New York Times. Launched in 2002 and long a mainstay of campaign writers and news consumers alike, the RCP average, he learned, was part of a “torrent” of partisan rubbish being “weaponized” to “deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm” and “undermine faith in the entire system.”

“They actually wrote that our problem was we didn’t weight results,” says an incredulous McIntyre. “That we didn’t put a thumb on the scale.”

The New York Times denounced a poll aggregator’s lack of subjectivity.

The Times ended its screed against RCP’s “scarlet-dominated” electoral map projection by quoting John Anzalone, Joe Biden’s former chief pollster, who said: “There’s a ton of garbage polls out there.” But being called “garbage” in America’s paper of record was nothing compared to what happened to RCP at Wikipedia.

Elections Have Consequences: How Trump’s Second Term Challenges the Political Status Quo Democrats assert power after victories, while Republicans compromise—Trump’s 2024 return, with bold Cabinet picks, challenges this norm. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/17/elections-have-consequences-how-trumps-second-term-challenges-the-political-status-quo/

“Elections,” Barack Obama told a group of cowering Republican lawmakers early in 2009, “have consequences.” He then drove the point home by reminding them, “I won.”

In truth, Democrats tend to understand this law of the political universe more clearly than do Republicans.

The usual rule is this: when Democrats win elections, they wield power. When Republicans win elections, they seek, or at least agree to, compromise.

In Suicide of the West, the political philosopher James Burnham quotes the nineteenth-century French writer Louis Veuillot, who summed up the essence of this political dialectic in one elegant sentence. Quand je suis le plus faible, je vous demande la liberté parce que tel est votre principe; mais quand je suis le plus fort, je vous l’ôte, parce que tel est le mien. “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.”

For examples of the latter, I invite you to ponder the behavior of Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, especially the behavior of the despicable Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, these last three and a half years.

Had the Democrats won the 2024 election, we would have seen many more examples of this principle in action. Assuming the Dems had kept the Senate, we would have seen them dispense with the filibuster, thus turning that chamber into what outgoing West Virginian Senator Joe Manchin called “the House on steroids.” They would have packed the Supreme Court, adding a few new “progressive” members to the bench to counter the power of Justices like Clarence Thomas. They likely would have imposed term- or age-limits on the Justices as well.

Elsewhere, I endeavored to provide a brief inventory of the “consequences” of a Harris victory. Donald Trump would have been bankrupted and jailed. It is likely that the same thing would have happened to Elon Musk. Just as John Kerry promised, the First Amendment would have been gutted if not discarded altogether in order to further the censorship and surveillance regime of the woke, progressive elite. A virtual ban on fracking and the mining of coal would have been enacted, further depressing America’s prosperity. The trans insanity of the last decade would have been extended, destroying women’s sports and disfiguring, mentally as well as physically, many thousands of confused teenagers.

Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/11/tulsi-gabbard-director-of-national-intelligence?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tulsi-gabbard-director-of-national-intelligence

Tulsi Gabbard has just been appointed as the Director of National Intelligence. She has criticized the Biden administration for not being sufficiently supportive of Israel since October 7, 2023. She has spoken out about Islamic terrorism. She is a Hindu — she was sworn in as a congresswoman on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita — and that may mean she is aware of what the centuries of Muslim rule meant for the Hindus of India.

She was once a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, and even ran for president in 2020 in the Democratic primary. But since then she has had a road-to-Damascus conversion, and become a Republican. More on Tulsi Gabbard can be found here: “Trump selects Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence,” by Marc Rod, Jewish Insider, November 13, 2024:

…Gabbard, a military veteran, has been critical of the Biden administration for being insufficiently supportive of Israel since Oct. 7. She has been vocal against Islamic terrorism and has expressed strong support for the Jewish state, including at a speech at a Christians United for Israel conference during her time in Washington.

To see how far she has come, consider that in the past she voted against a House resolution condemning the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution opposing Israeli settlements. In 2019 she refused to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for antisemitic comments about U.S. support for Israel and voted for a resolution sponsored by Omar that aimed to defend the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. But Gabbard has since then clearly expressed her opposition to the BDS movement and voted for anti-BDS legislation. And in 2020, she even supported Bernie Sanders, a severe critic of Israel, to be President. But that was a world away from Tulsi Gabbard today; the former Democrat has been appearing at rallies for Donald Trump.

By 2022, she had moved rightward. In October 2024 she stood by Donald Trump at a rally and announced that she was joining the Republican Party. She explained that she found she agreed with the Republicans on the most important issues, including immigration. She described the Democratic Party as “unrecognizable” from what it had been twenty years before , and she attacked the “elitist cabal of warmongers” and “woke” ideologue” in the party.

She has said that anti-Israel college protesters are “antisemitic” and have become “puppets” of a “radical Islamist organization.” On October 7, 2024 she posted on Instagram that “Hamas’s horrific attack against Israel one year ago today that took the lives of approximately 1,200 Israelis at a music concert and in their homes, is a stark reminder of the ongoing short and long term threat of Islamist terrorism that continues to spread around the world today. Their goal is to establish a global Islamist caliphate, where all must live under their sharia law. Many leaders in the west have promised to defeat this threat and failed, because they refuse to acknowledge that it must be defeated ideologically and militarily.”

Seth Barron Team of Successors Donald Trump’s appointments so far, some startling, share a common thread—comparative youth, an indication that the president-elect is looking beyond his own tenure.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/team-of-successors

Donald Trump has announced his first high-level appointments, including some surprising choices. Pete Hegseth, best known for his Fox News appearances, was nominated as Secretary of Defense. Matt Gaetz, who waged an intraparty feud against fellow Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has been put forward as Attorney General. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat and acerbic critic of the intelligence community, has been named Director of National Intelligence. These nominees, among others Trump has offered, have generated tremendous consternation, in some cases running across party lines. Trump’s nominees have been called unqualified, partisan, and even threats to national security. But a significant and unnoticed thread unites the team that Trump is assembling around himself—their age, or rather, their youth.

Hegseth is 44. Matt Gaetz is 42. Tulsi Gabbard is 43. Vice President-elect J. D. Vance is 40, as is Trump’s proposed U.N. Ambassador Elise Stefanik. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, is 44. Vivek Ramaswamy, who will work with Elon Musk in non-official, nongovernmental effort nevertheless named the Department of Governmental Efficiency, is 39. Other major appointees are slightly older: proposed Homeland Security nominee Kristi Noem is 52, and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio is 53, as is Musk. But it’s clear that Trump’s Cabinet-level staff skews young. In this respect it marks a departure from the Cabinet that Trump picked in 2016, when he chose an older, more conventionally qualified team. The average age of his picks for Defense, State, and Justice eight years ago was 67; the average age for those same roles today is 46.  

Let Me Count the Ways By Joan Swirsky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/let_me_count_the_ways.html

On November 5, 2024, a gigantic red wave engulfed America, elevating everything politically red to great heights and largely obliterating everything politically blue in its path.
It’s been only a week since the presidential election, but let’s ask the following questions anyway:

WHAT DID RED GAIN?

The White House — Oval Office.
The U.S. Senate.
The U.S. House of Representatives.
The Electoral College.
The popular vote.
All seven swing states.
State governor majority.
State Legislature majority.
The stock market hit record highs.

And Pamela Geller reports:

Trump and Elon Musk told Zelenskyy that the war is over, to prepare for negotiations, no additional funds or weapons will be sent to Ukraine.

Hamas called for an immediate end to the war.
Trump Gave Hamas until Inauguration Day to return the hostages.
The Houthis surrendered just hours after Trump won the Presidency.
The EU said it will buy its oil from America not Russia.

Qatar told all Hamas officials in the country to leave immediately.
Iran’s currency crashed.

Additionally:

The Fed cut interest rates a quarter of a point after Trump’s election victory. 

China’s President Xi Jinping congratulated Donald Trump on his U.S. presidential win and urged both nations to find the “right way to get along,” as looming U.S. tariffs threatened to return, as they did years ago.