Prediction: Trump By A Nose!

My prediction is that Donald Trump will win the election in two weeks.  I think he may actually win the popular vote as well. I’m referring to the actual votes of actual Americans, not the manipulated votes produced by computer tampering, illegals and mail in fraud.

That doesn’t mean that on the morning of the 6th we’ll have a conclusive answer as to who the next president will be. No, sadly, given the Democrat propensity to cheat and the Swamp’s desire to defeat Trump, we’re likely looking at an adjudication clusterfark that could take weeks or even months. 

So, despite polls currently telling us that the race is close or basically tied (Today the NYT has Harris up by 1, 538 has Harris up by 1.4% and RCP has Trump up by .4%) why do I believe Trump is going to clean the floor with Harris when it comes to real, actual votes?  A plethora of reasons.

Yard signs.  This is the most ambiguous measure, but it’s the one that resonates most viscerally because it reflects enthusiasm.  I just spent three weeks in New York on business. I landed at JFK, drove 400 miles to Buffalo, and a week later drove back.  Over that entire trip I didn’t see any random Harris signs on barns or sides of buildings or flags seemingly bigger than the houses they were flying in front of, all things I saw for Trump.  The ratio of Trump to Harris signs throughout was probably at least 10 to 1.  And this is New York! I did however encounter three towns where Harris signs dominated: East Aurora and Williamsville near Buffalo and Hastings on Hudson, just north of New York City.  All three are quaint, bucolic towns with coffee bars, art galleries and lots of college educated liberals.  At the end of the day, in a hardcore blue state like New York, where Harris is projected to win by double digits, the dearth of enthusiastic support suggests that her support is tepid and the margin of victory may not be what’s predicted. 

Right track, wrong track.  Forty four years ago Ronald Reagan looked into the camera at the last debate with Jimmy Carter and asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the store than it was four years ago?” Today, almost every single American understands that the answer to that question in 2024 is a resounding “No”, and regardless of what they think about Trump, they know that it was Biden, Harris and the Democrats who created this disaster.  Two weeks out from the election, fully 2/3 of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. People know they’re paying more for gasoline, housing, food, insurance and practically everything else in the economy.  However that 2/3 might define that wrong track, those are real, tangible pain points of daily life and most citizens recognize Democrats as the source.  Americans, including some Democrats, are not crazy, and when given a choice between more of the same – or worse – when things are going badly, will choose to make a change towards a better direction – or at least the promise of one.  In our basically two party system, that means that they will turn towards Trump and the GOP.

Facetime:  Not the iPhone kind of facetime, but the time candidate’s faces are showing up on various media.  Trump, of course, is all over the media, from his Pennsylvania rallies, to his interviews to, most recently, his McDonalds campaign stop / fry shift / photo op.  Harris, not so much, and when she is on, even when sitting for outlets that support her, like CBS, the story ends up being a controversy about her answers rather than the typical hagiography. At the same time Trump was generating enormous amounts of engaging press coverage serving fries out  McDonalds drive through window and posing for selflies, Harris was making news for taking only  pre-approved questions and telling Christians they’re at the wrong rally. 

Personal connection:  When Trump talks, he talks a lot.  Harris, not so much.  According to the New York Times, at three rallies Trump averaged speaking 98 minutes while Harris averaged a mere 24 minutes.  And while Trump talks about pretty much anything and everything, Harris seems to have a very limited catalog of ideas from which she can draw.  Indeed, the GOP made a full four minute video of her repeating “Unburdened by what has been.” Americans see that Donald Trump is a guy you could have a beer with, talk at length to and feel like you would walk away having made a friend or at least met someone who understands your problems. Kamala Harris on the other hand is a manikin or a robot that’s been programmed with minimal RAM where if you ask “What’s up?” rather than “How are you doing today?” the system will overload and smoke will start coming out of her ears. She’s not funny or smart or insightful and has no convictions beyond basic Communism.  Most Americans see that. 

Betting: Polls are notorious for being more propaganda than reflections of reality. That’s because they’re run by elite organizations with biases seeking to bolster support of one candidate or another. Betting markets on the other hand, AKA prediction markets, represent anything but that.  The leading platform, Polymarket, today sees a 64% chance Trump wins vs Harris’36%.  The over $2 billion this international crypto market has  bet on the American presidential election is largely made up of small bets, not elites seeking to influence the outcome. The proof of the market’s potential as a prediction tool can be seen in the fact that the Wall Street Journal ran a piece seeking to delegitimize it.    

Quality of life: Vermont is America’s socialist Nirvana. Today however, the state's largest city Burlington has become a dystopian nightmare.  By day, the city is the quintessential small town New England. At night however it transforms into a scene from the Walking Dead with drug addicts, homeless and violent criminals taking over.  And of course it’s not just Burlington. It’s New York, San Francisco, Seattle and of course Denver, where violent Venezuelan gangs have taken over whole apartment complexes while extorting and terrorizing residents and owners. From schools that don’t educate to influxes of illegals to increasing crime, leftists across the country are coming face to face with the reality of the failure of Democrat policies.  While all complain, some are objective enough to understand the source and vote accordingly.

All of this to say, while the majority of blacks and gays and Jews and crazy cat ladies, and antidepressant addled college educated white women and their beta male boyfriends or husbands will vote for Harris without ever giving a consideration for or knowledge of her policies, a certain percentage of them will be making decisions based on the reality of life that’s staring them in the face. Those people will be voting for Trump. Together with the rabid MAGA following Trump has inspired, he should win the actual vote handily.  But as we all know, Stalin’s aphorism applies: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA

The Twisted Line from Broken Windows to a Broken Republic

Years ago I was writing about blacks and Democrats and looked at the impact Rudy Giuliani made in New York City.  Over the course of his tenure from 1994 – 2002 there were 3,440 fewer black murder victims in the city than there might have been had New York simply experienced the average nationwide crime decline between 1994 & 2002.  “That’s 3,440 families that did not lose a son, a father, a breadwinner, or a role model. 3,440 black men still alive to take care of and support their families…”

Saving 3,400 black lives and keeping 3,400 families intact didn’t happen in a vacuum. Those lives were saved by better policing, or more accurately, actual policing, via a program “Broken Windows”.  The Broken Windows policing approach was developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982.  “Broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.”

And in the early 90’s the visible signs of crime in New York City were everywhere. Subways were covered with graffiti; Times Square was nothing but peep shows, liquor stores and vacant storefronts.  But there weren’t only signs of crime, there was actual crime, and a lot of it, with violent crime and murder rampant.  In 1993 there were 2,420 murders in NYC for a rate of 13.3 per 100,000, almost 50% above the national average of 9.51. 

With the advent of Broken Windows, the city started cleaning up graffiti, arresting the squeegee thugs who intimidated drivers stopped at red lights and started targeting petty criminals.  Giuliani knew what he was doing.  Before his election he said that “he cared about statistics, but the real measure would be whether people actually felt safer. That, he said, was the ultimate test of policing and political leadership.” By the time he left office in 2002 he had delivered both the statistics and a feeling of safety – at 960 the murder rate had plummeted by 64% or 4.75 per 100,000, 15% below the national average. As the crime rate plummeted the city and its citizens thrived.  Times Square transformed from a seedy denizen of hookers and pickpockets and drug dealers into a shining tourist Mecca filled with glistening theaters and hotels and restaurants.  SoHo and Chelsea and Greenwich Village transformed into vibrant, inviting places. New Yorkers and tourists alike felt like New York was once again a place they could enjoy without feeling like they were in a war zone…

The point of all of this is, small things matter.  Subways covered in graffiti, people urinating in the streets, homeless camping out on sidewalks and kids stealing beers and Nyquil from CVS… none of these things by themselves send a society into the abyss.  But when they’re tolerated they tell the perpetrators that laws don’t matter, and soon shoplifting turns to burglary turns to robbery which turns to assault and sometimes murder. And, as criminals and crime proliferate and violence becomes more common, those law abiding citizens who can, flee for safer pastures, and all that remain in cities are criminals and their next victims who don’t have the resources to escape or can afford their own personal protection militia.  That’s when dystopia goes from being the fiction of Hollywood blockbusters to reality.

None of this is particularly insightful requiring an above average IQ to see.  But just because something is common sense doesn’t mean it’s common.  The idiocy of the anti Broken Windows theory, if one might call it that, was demonstrated by the clearly low IQ mayor of Baltimore Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in 2015 in the wake of the death of Freddy Gray in police custody.  The mayor stated that “while we try to make sure that they (protestors) were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well”. So the chief law enforcement officer of the city of a major American city decided to give “protesters” space to destroy said city. What was important was not the right of private property owners to retain their property, not the desires of citizens to be safe in their communities, not the expectations of taxpayers that their leaders would enforce the law… no it was the wishes of those intent on destruction. 

Small things lead to big things and the results were predictable, although protesters destroying property are not exactly small things.  In 2014 there were 211 murders in Baltimore for a rate of 33.84 per 100,000 citizens. Already high compared to the national average of 4.44, things got a lot worse afterwards and every year since 2015 the city has had over 300 murders with 2021 coming in at 337 and a murder rate of 58.27 per 100,000.

And of course the thing about murder is that it is the most extreme crime possible.  It’s at the top of the crime pyramid if you will – as an example, out of a given set of criminals, 80% might be willing to commit robbery, 40% assault and perhaps 2% murder. We therefore can assume that if the tip of that crime pyramid is getting bigger, the lower part is growing in tandem, if not more.  And indeed it has. Additionally, murder is relatively easy to measure as you usually have a body to count.  With most other crimes it’s harder to know a crime has been committed as typically someone needs to report it, and increasingly people are simply not bothering as they feel like nothing is going to be done, particularly as it can take literally hours for just to get a response from a 911 call in the first place.

Although George Soros’ DAs are a BIG part of the problem, out on the streets the problem is clearly less policing, both in terms of actual police numbers and what laws are being enforced.  As such, the solution would seem obvious:  More police and more enforcement.  But there’s the rub. As woke cities and states reduced the enforcement of and penalties for crimes in the name of “equity” they simultaneously eviscerated their police forces.  Not only are cops retiring and “quitting in droves”, but across the country cities are finding it increasingly challenging to recruit new officers to fill the vacancies.  So now they find themselves in a situation where they have more crime and fewer officers to enforce the law. 

That’s a vicious societal death spiral that’s extraordinarily difficult to pull out of.  The increase in crime chases more taxpayers and tax generating employers out of the cities and states just at the time when those bodies have to spend more trying to recruit new officers.  Eventually other services suffer and more people decide to leave, further eroding the tax base and the community.  We see that taking place in real time as citizens are escaping crime ridden cesspools in droves. 

But the thing is, that vicious cycle doesn’t start out that way. It starts with words like “empathy” and “tolerance” and “equity” being used to turn a blind eye to those aforementioned small things.  While empathy and tolerance might be laudable as personal characteristics, they, along with the fiction of “equity”, are cancers as governing characteristics. Democrats leverage voters’ sympathies to push for policies that sound humane but in reality create needle and crime ridden homeless encampments, eviscerate the criminal justice system and make life worse for virtually every citizen in the country. 

Can America pull out of this societal death spiral?  That’s a good question.  It will take voters deciding that reality trumps emotion and that an imperfect Republican Party trumps a soulless Democrat Party.  We’ll see on November 9 whether Americans 0f 2022 have the courage New Yorkers exhibited in 1993. 

Thirsty Californians and unemployed New Yorkers - Sacrifices to Liberalism's Global Warming Delusion

Liberals often live in a fantasy world that ignores the real world right in front of them. They continue to pour trillions of dollars into poverty programs despite the fact that poverty persists and grows. Their go to solution for failing and failed government schools is always spend more money rather than embrace solutions that actually work such as charter schools or voucher programs. It’s no surprise then that their tired solutions rarely ever solve the problems they are ostensibly focused on.

Strangely, that dynamic exists even when the problem itself is fiction. The perfect example of this is the state of California. In an effort to address congestion on California roads (which is a real problem) and to fight man-made global warming (which is a fiction) California is planning on spending anywhere from an estimated $68 to $98 billion taxpayer dollars to build a high speed rail link from Los Angeles and San Francisco. This, despite the fact that most traffic in California is from people traveling within metro areas, not between them. Think about it, LA’s worst traffic is usually 10-15 miles on the 405 or I-10 during rush hour, not on I-5 north of the city. A high speed rail ticket between LA and San Francisco that was originally projected to cost $50 is now expected to cost more than $81. That’s a round trip cost of either $100 or $162. Today you can get a round trip plane ticket between the same two cities for $135. What’s more, the line will likely require additional hundreds of millions of taxpayer subsidies annually just to maintain operations... and it will increase carbon emissions!

So there we have it, California plans to spend what will likely be in excess of $100 billion to build a rail system to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and another that can’t be solved by such a system. This, while the state is facing a real problem that it actually can solve: a shortage of water. The state has been gripped in a drought for years, but even in non-drought years water is a problem in California. In addition to families with no water, in the San Joaquin Valley, dubbed “America’s salad bowl” vegetable farms are left idle as there is no water for irrigation. (The drought is not the only cause there…) The $100 billion that the state is wasting building the rail boondoggle could be spent instead on desalinization plants up and down the Pacific coast. Recently the nation’s largest desalinization plant opened in San Diego… but it almost didn’t as years were wasted fighting litigation by environmental groups. That $1 billion facility will produce enough drinking water for approximately 250,000 people annually. Using that metric, for the amount of money California is wasting on the rail system it could desalinate enough water for 26 million people, more than 65% of its population.

The reality is however that the state doesn’t need to build desalinization plants to support 65% of its population. It’s likely that building the capacity necessary to provide water to 20% would be more than sufficient to address most water issues, and that could be done for approximately $30 billion. But that’s not on the books. Given that California is the epicenter of liberalism in the US, that’s not a surprise.

If there is a second center of liberalism in the US, it’s undoubtedly New York, and not surprisingly, it suffers from the same problem as California. Only in New York the tool of choice for seeking to slay the faux dragon of man-made global warming is not absurdly expensive transportation subsidies, but rather absurdly expensive green energy subsidies. New York has recently agreed to spend close to $1 billion subsidizing multi billionaire Elon Musk’s money losing solar panel installation company, SolarCity. This, while the governor of a state with a 6.6% unemployment rate continues to ban the fracking for natural gas, a cleaning burning fuel that has pumped billions of dollars in to the economies of states from North Dakota to Pennsylvania while creating tens of thousands of good paying jobs. So once again, a liberal state is spending boatloads of taxpayer dollars to solve a problem that doesn’t even exist while at the same time it refuses to look at a viable solution to real problems – in this case unemployment and energy prices.

And so it goes with liberalism, using rational solutions to attack real problems takes a back seat to solving fake problems that dovetail with the left’s worldview, regardless of the consequences. California is in the midst of a water shortage that is having devastating consequences on millions of its citizens on a daily basis. New York is seeing jobs and citizens flee the state for lower taxes and better job prospects. In both states the governors have decided those very real problems are not as important as pandering to their political base by tilting at the windmill of global warming. The result is actually worse than if the state did nothing at all. If they were doing nothing the taxpayers would at least be no worse off than they are now. Unfortunately however, the taxpayers in the 4th and 1st highest tax states (respectively) are on the hook millions or billions of dollars and will be much worse off in the long run. Such is liberalism: obscure failure in the real world by selling grand designs of some future success that never quite works out as promised… then simply count on voters to forget about that failure as you dazzle them with your next quixotic mirage.