By Debra Heine, AMERICAN GREATNESS
This past weekend saw another round of massive Trump caravans and convoys throughout the nation, underscoring yet again the enormous enthusiasm gap between President Trump and his Democrat opponent Joe Biden.
American Greatness attended a Trump Car Parade in Overland Park, Kansas, on Saturday that had thousands of participants.
Following the Trump car Parade, there was a big Back the Blue rally featuring Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis Couple who were indicted for brandishing weapons after a Black Lives Matter mob invaded their property. Nearly 2,000 people attended the rally.
In his speech, Mark McCloskey explained in detail what happened on that day last June he and his wife found themselves facing down a violent mob with no police to protect them.
A “Ridin’ With Biden” parade in Kansas City brought out approximately two dozen supporters, according to KSHB. It’s hard to find pictures online of the poorly attended Biden event, so we have to take KSHB’s word for it that 24 cars participated. Here is a screenshot from the KSHB story.
There was a huge, bumper to bumper Trump caravan in Miami with as many as 30,000 vehicles:
The “Ridin’ with Biden” caravan in Miami over the weekend had as many as 15 vehicles, one observer counted.
There were also big Trump Car parades in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and Stockholm, Wisconsin.
Americans for Trump Big Truck Convoy in Long Island, New York reportedly had thousands of participants.
While the Trump car parades on Saturday were a huge success, Team Biden’s “Ridin’ With Biden’” events on Sunday fizzled badly, unable to drum up excitement anywhere, even in Democrat strongholds.
This “Ridin’ with Biden” event near Plano, Texas attracted less than 30 participants. And they were all wearing masks.
A Fox10 reporter in Phoenix, AZ, was perplexed by the total lack of excitement surrounding a Biden/Harris campaign event on October 8.
Reporter Nicole Garcia noted that the only people she saw in the parking lot of the Heard Museum in central Phoenix were members of the Biden Campaign and pool reporters. Part of the reason was that the appearance, like all of Biden’s campaign appearances, was kept hush-hush until the last minute.
“I’m told by one of the Biden staffers, local staffers, is that they kind of kept the details about the visit, as far as the timing and the exact locations, they didn’t really want to give that out to the public because they want to keep the crowds to a minimum. They realize we are in a pandemic and they don’t want a crowd of more than 50 people at any of their events,” Garcia said in the report.
“This is a pretty big event for the two of them to be campaigning together for the first time since the Democratic National Convention,” she said. “Here in Arizona our state has established itself as a battleground state and so this is technically a big event, but not a lot of fans here,” said Garcia.
It’s been suggested that Democrat voters are more motivated to vote against Trump than they are to vote for Biden. Moreover, a recent poll found that Democrats are much more fearful of catching Covid-19 than Republicans. However, the lack of enthusiasm for Biden does not bode well for the Democrat ticket.
Debra Heine is a conservative Catholic mom of six and longtime political pundit. She has written for several conservative news websites over the years, including Breitbart and PJ Media.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
You’d have known about that Gateway item on Biden’s Arizona no-show rally a few days ago if you’d read “According to Edgar G”…when I first mentioned it.
From Today’s MarketWatch site: Economy & Politics
Paul Brandus
Opinion: Biden will win, polls say. But the stock market is sending a different signal
Published: Oct. 13, 2020 at 11:10 a.m. ET
By Paul Brandus
62
A century’s worth of election-year data suggests President Trump will win re-election
With three weeks to go, President Trump’s re-election bid is in trouble. At least that’s what the polls show.
But it’s not what the stock market is signaling. Based on nearly a century’s worth of election-year data, Trump may yet win.
“A rising stock market tends to be a ratification of the present policies being satisfying to the investing public.”
— Julian Emanuel, chief equity and derivative strategist at BTIG
Here’s the research, and it is compelling: Since 1928, whenever the S&P 500 Index SPX, -0.44% of the largest U.S. stocks has risen in the three months prior to a presidential election, the party that controlled the White House won 90% of the time.
“If you think about it intuitively, it makes sense,” says Julian Emanuel, chief equity and derivative strategist for the investment firm BTIG who compiled the data. “Because a rising stock market tends to be a ratification of the present policies being satisfying to the investing public.”
History lines up squarely behind Emanuel. In 1928, for example, President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican, chose to retire, but stocks rose between August and November. It was the last full year of the Roaring ’20s and helped lift the new GOP standard bearer, Herbert Hoover, into the White House.
Four years later, the reverse occurred. The Great Depression, which began in the fall of 1929, dragged down stocks — including between August and November 1932 — and Hoover was crushed by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In fact, there have been six presidential years since 1928 when the S&P 500 fell in the three months before election day. All six times, the party in the White House lost.
In meting out its punishment, the markets have proven to be agnostic. In three of those six instances, Republicans lost. In the other three, Democrats did. In addition to 1932, Republicans also controlled the White House in 1960, but Vice President Richard Nixon fell short in his bid to replace President Dwight Eisenhower. In 2008, Republican George W. Bush was in the White House, but GOP nominee John McCain lost to Democrat Barack Obama.
The three times that Democrats lost? Harry Truman chose to retire in 1952, but nominee Adlai Stevenson was crushed by Eisenhower. In 2000, Al Gore, the incumbent vice president, lost to Bush. And just four years ago, Donald Trump upended Hillary Clinton’s bid.
This year’s setup
That’s the history. What about now?
Three months prior to election day (Nov. 3), the S&P 500 was at 3,271 points. It’s over 3,500 today, a gain of 7%. Based on Emanuel’s study of history, Trump is better positioned to win a second term than pollsters or the media seem to think.
Both, Emanuel says, may be “underestimating the probability of President Trump getting re-elected.”
He’s unswayed by Biden’s recent surge. The former vice president’s lead in national polls has risen from about 6.5 percentage points at the beginning of October to about 10.5 points now, according to aggregate data compiled by media sites Real Clear Politics and 538.
Emanuel’s answer to this: The race perhaps isn’t being handicapped correctly.
Critics of President Trump may claim that 2020 has been such an extraordinary year, replete with one awful event after another, that it’s an outlier, and therefore comparing it to past election and market cycles isn’t appropriate.
Turmoil in years past
Yet Emanuel’s data has held up through other difficult, dangerous, times too: the Great Depression, World War II and the Korean War. It even held up in 1968, the year of political assassinations, riots and Vietnam — even a pandemic that killed about 100,000 Americans, the Centers for Disease Control estimated.
Beyond the markets, Emanuel says certain factors could still boost the president and thus “increase the uncertainty around the election outcome.” An election-eve stimulus package could be one, he says; getting Amy Coney Barrett confirmed for the Supreme Court could be another, though I suspect Barrett has already been taken into account.
“We do think that people are a bit too sanguine because the polls have widened wider than they did in 2016,” Emanuel says, adding, “We do not believe that such a certain outcome is warranted, in terms of how it’s been discounted by the markets.”
Election Day is three weeks away. That’s a lifetime in presidential politics, in which races can swing dramatically in the final days. Ronald Reagan crushed President Jimmy Carter in a landslide in 1980, but people forget that the former California governor trailed by as much as 8 points in mid-October.
And if Trump’s stunner four years ago didn’t teach Democrats about the dangers of complacency, then I don’t know what ever could.
A problem with Trump is that while when he speaks he is aggressive, runs his enemies and sometimes even his friends down, makes threats, his actions are the exact opposite. He is kind, forgiving and forbearing to a fault. He can’t bear to hurt anyone, not even his worst enemies, except by hurting their feelings by telling them what he thinks of them.
He could have arranged to have Hilary Clinton, Bill and several dozen other Democratic bigwigs indicted, had he been willing to appoint a special prosecutor or prosecutors to investigate them. But he didn’t. He could have prevented a special prosecutor from investigating him, and fired his own Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General when they appointed a known Trump enemy to investigate him But he didn’t—they stayed in office for a long time. He let the appointment and the investigation proceed, even though it was obviously aimed at him and his close associates, and caused both him and them enormous problems.
Trump holds regular press conferences attended by hundreds of his journalistic enemies. They bait , insult and argue with him constantly. But he doesn’t retaliate against them in any way except to answer their insults with some tough criticisms of their behavior. He seems to enjoy the give and take.
People have criticized Attorney General Barr for failing to indict any of the Democratic bigwigs, including Hillary, despite the extensive evidence of their wrongdoing reported by U.S. attorney Durham during his investigation. But I think it is unlikely that Barr, who can be tough when Trump lets him, would have exercised this kind of restrainst except on orders from Trump. Trump obviously can’t bear to have his political enemies prosecuted.
Trump couldn’t even bring himself to bomb Iran after they shot down an American drone and harrassed American ships on the high seas. He didn’t retaliate against the mullahs not because he was the least bit afraid of them, because he couldn’t bear the thought of killing innocent civilians. He has been willing to negotiate with one of America’s worst enemies, the Taliban. He has been willing to negotiate and meet with another one of America’s worst enemies, Kim of North Korea. No previous president has been willing to do this. He did all this not because he is a coward, but because he believes in going the second mile to achieve peace with America’s enemies, rather than fighting another costly war.
If Trump was as tough in deeds as he is in words, his reelection would be a foregone conclusion.
According to Gateway Pundit, there was one Biden event, I think it was in Arizona, where no one showed up at all, and they had to cancel it.
While there is obviously no enthusiasm for Biden, this will only help us if many of these unenthusiastic Democrats decide not to vote, not even by mail or by pre-election-day voting, or if they decide to vote “down-ticket,” but abstain on the Presidential vote (many Democrats did that in 2016, which is what actually gave Trump his victory). It is unrealistic to think that many Democrats and liberal independents will vote for Trump.
I am somewhat saddened to read that there were long lines for the first pre-election vote day in South Carolina. The people who come out for pre-election voting are mainly African-Americans bused in by their pastor. Their pastor always urges them to vote Democrat as well. The poll-watchers are usually too intimidated by the large crowds getting of the bus and the presence of clergy “officiating” and “organizing: to question voters to make sure they are registered, voting in the right precinct, etc. This time around, they will also be accused of being racists if they try to question anyone on the voters line.
This will be a very difficult election for the Democrats to loose. But a mixture of lack of enthusiasm for Biden and overconfidence by the Democratic campaign might just do it.