Far From Being a Toss Up, Polls Suggest the Coming Election Looks Like a Blowout for Trump

By Conrad Black

It has become an annoying and an obsolescent truism to claim that the presidential election is a toss up, a coin toss. This is the opinion of the Democrats still desperately clinging to the possibility of electoral deliverance from a fate so horrible that they had banished it from their imaginations for most of the last four years: the reelection of Donald Trump.

It is also the last refuge of the Never Trumpers, a group that persists and festers in the Republican establishment and a few related elite grips, but amongst the electorate, the Never Trumpers are almost extinct. Almost none of his comments, unlike four or eight years ago, need to be walked back; instead of the vintage Ugly American bully that his opponents represented him as throughout his first term as president, we now have the author of what could be the greatest comeback in American political history, surpassing even Richard Nixon.

The Harris campaign for president has finally reminded the American voters that two thirds of them thought she was an incompetent vice president: The border tsar who presided over the illegal entry of over 10 million people, including scores of thousands of violent criminals, and who caused the American government virtually to go into business with the most violent criminal gangs in the world.

Imagining that the chief grievance of voters with the Biden administration was the outgoing president’s age and generally befuddled condition, Vice President Harris, co-captain of the most incompetent administration since before the Civil War, was unable to find any point of difference with President Biden. The country was not prepared to reelect such an inept government, and it was not really prepared to elect such an inadequate vice president either.

Donald Trump, who is the alternative, is the man who governed successfully, almost without inflation, who ended illegal migration, unemployment, and oil imports, and presided over peace in the world. He is also a man who has been more harassed and oppressed by corrupt perversions of the intelligence agencies and the justice department than any president in American history, and he is, with Gerald Ford, the only president to be the survivor of two known assassination attempts within a few days, neither of which, in Trump’s case, would have occurred if the Secret Service had been competently directed.

As we entered the last week of this long and  nasty campaign, the polls which are not conducted by left-wing universities or media outlets give Trump a two to three percent lead in the national vote, and even most of those that show the contest to be even, show President Trump winning all seven of the swing states, albeit most of them narrowly, but these are averages of polls, most of which habitually and deliberately underestimate Trump’s support.

This is not what a tossup election looks like. Trump is not dependent upon show business people to get the crowds out for him; he is the draw, and no president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has pulled such large crowds, though Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan had their moments. Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Obamas, like a team of spavined fire-horses, have been sent out to help Ms. Harris, but it has been a fiasco.

President Clinton criticized the Biden-Harris border policy, Secretary Clinton got into her nonsense about Hitler, a gaunt and white-haired Mr. Obama attacked “the brothers” for being unappreciative of Ms. Harris. Trump found le mot juste in saying the former president was acting like “a jerk.”

The exhausted and defeated forces of Never Trumpism are going to their bunkers to prepare for the results. Some reassure themselves that the country is strong and can endure anything and merely hope that at least one of the houses of Congress is not in the same hands as the White House so that we can have four years of ineffective government. Some are going down with the myth that this is a desperately close election.

At the end of the great imposture of the Clinton-Obama-Biden years, and their chief interruption, the unforgettable failure of the George W. Bush presidency; all of the leading spokesmen of those presidents are trying to put on a bold face of a tight race to the end. The Democrats, unable to defend the Biden record, and unable to produce a new program which the country could take seriously, are reduced to describing Trump as a fascist or a Nazi.

It would be difficult to conceive a more asinine and implausible argument. Mrs. Clinton implies that the fact that he would be  holding a rally in Madison Square Garden replicates the Deutsche Amerika Bund of 1939. Yet almost every successful candidate for president since before FDR has held big rallies at Madison Square Garden. No one who has the remotest grasp that the Nazis unleashed an aggressive war that killed 60 million people, and gassed and burned twelve million innocent people in death camps could think of Donald Trump in this context.

In the desperation of their inability to defend or repudiate the Biden administration, the Harris campaign has gone down-market to take refuge in the rubbish about fascists and Nazis. Even the first lady, Jill Biden, if asked, would have come up with a more original charge than that. Ms. Harris appears to have no idea what a fascist is. General John Kelly and General Mark Milley have disgraced themselves with their disloyalty and ingratitude.

The Republican Never Trumpers are reduced to a tired and bedraggled gang, sulking that neither candidate is adequate, and whichever loses will have him- or herself to blame. The Biden administration and to some extent the Obama administration and even the Clintons also are about to be repudiated.

It now appears that Trump will take more than 300 electoral votes, all or almost all of the swing states, and both houses of the Congress. America will get through another Trump term a great deal more comfortably than it has limped and floundered through the Gong Show of the Biden-Harris years. Much better days are immediately ahead.

First published in the New York Sun