T. Belman. As you would expect from the NYT, this is a puff piece. If you go to realClearPolitics you will see an updated survey of all the polls. They strongly favour Biden and so do the odds makers. (For my part, it boggles the mind why anyone would vote for Biden, especially blacks.
Rasmussen article explains what is wrong with the polls.
When it comes to opinion polls, just like hurricane or virus models, who has been the most accurate in the past? Rasmussen was the most accurate pollster of 2016 in terms of the popular vote. Less accurate polls, based on their models, predicted a Hillary Clinton landslide.
Rasmussen, to its credit, polls likely voters, rather than registered voters, only about half of whom vote, or adults, an even smaller percentage of whom vote. Most polls skew the survey group, oversampling Democrats, sometimes significantly, finding false support for a Democrat viewpoint.
The Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll during the month of March shows Trump in the high 40 percent approval range, the same as President Obama at the exact same point in his presidency. One president is presiding over a once-in-a-century viral pandemic which has shut down much of the U.S. economy, while the other president was running for reelection, backed by an adoring media. Yet they poll similarly.
If Trump was doing such a bad job today, his numbers would in the low 30s, not close to 50% where he has been for much of his first term.
Real Clear Politics combines a number of public opinion polls into an average. Its most recent results show 49.8 percent approval for the president compared to 47.7 percent disapproval. These polls reflect the typical oversampling of Democrats meaning the real numbers are likely even higher for Trump.
All the protesters both law abiding and unruly, believe that there is systemic racism in the police force even though there is no truth in it.
The Myth of Systemic Police Racism
They shouldn’t lose hope. They are at the heart of the fight to take back America.
By Juan Williams, NYT (Mr. Williams is a Fox News analyst.)
In Columbia, S.C., on Saturday, a young protester told a reporter that she just didn’t think voting is “how change happens.”
“They’ve been telling us to do that for so long,” she added, “and we’ve done it — and look at everything that’s still going on.”
Fury over the cruel death of George Floyd, a black man in police custody, combined with fear of a deadly virus and its painful economic impact, make this a dark, dizzying moment in our national life. But African-Americans shouldn’t feel hopeless, because the black vote does matter — it has never mattered more. It is at the heart of the fight to take back America.
The biggest story of 2020 politics is hard to ignore. But somehow it is being ignored.
The black vote now defines American politics.
Joe Biden would be retired if not for the black vote. Black voters made him the Democrats’ presidential nominee. In November, the number of black voters who turn out in the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin is likely to be the deciding factor in the election. That means black voters, 12 percent of the national electorate, are set to pick our next president.<
Black women, the most reliable activist base of the party, are this year’s version of the stars of past campaigns — Soccer Moms and Blue Collar Moms. The best illustration of this power is a black woman asking Jim Clyburn, her South Carolina congressman, who he planned to vote for in the primary. He said Joe Biden and followed up with a public endorsement: “We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us.”
Mr. Biden went on to blow out the competition in South Carolina and easily win the rest of the South. Two top competitors with no traction among black voters, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, dropped out and endorsed him.
The party’s sudden consolidation around Mr. Biden abruptly ended a confusing race that many feared was hurtling toward an open convention. Few had seen it coming. Mr. Biden looked boring in comparison with the impassioned Bernie Sanders and the furious Donald Trump. Yet polls consistently showed that in a general election matchup, it was Mr. Biden who held the highest margin of victory over Mr. Trump.
There are many reasons for black voters to like Mr. Biden — his record on judicial appointments and voting rights during his long tenure on the Senate Judiciary Committee; his work on federal stimulus spending after the recession and on Obamacare; and of course his service as vice president to the nation’s first black president.
But beating Mr. Trump tops the list. For black voters, the prospect of four more years of this administration is about more than politics.
It’s personal.
It is a reaction born of real fear — of the racism that led a white man to shoot Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and a white police officer to press his knee into the neck of George Floyd in Minnesota, of the racism that every day results in more black people dying of the coronavirus. African-Americans see this, and they see a president who does nothing to stop it.
Contrary to the image created by news coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests, 43 percent of black voters are moderates. A quarter identify as conservatives. These are the black people in church on Sunday. They are proud members of a sorority or fraternity.
Russian trolls recognized the power of these voters. “No single group” was targeted more than African-Americans, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report on interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The Russians wanted to drive down black enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton. But they also worked to deepen the black-white divide to increase white turnout for the Republican Party.
Their bots and trolls depicted black Americans as synonymous with the loudest activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. They amplified Mr. Trump’s tactic of appealing to “forgotten” white voters by demonizing blacks and Latinos, suggesting they bring crime and bad schools into white neighborhoods and contribute to the flight of American jobs.
The strategy seems to have succeeded.
In 2016, while white turnout went up, “the black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election,” according to the Pew Research Center.
@ Ted Belman:
Ok
@ Laura:
I use it as a backdrop for my preface.
Why would you post anything from the NY slimes. That is an enemy newspaper.