Should Joe Stay or Go? –

President and candidate Joe Biden tried to recover his campaign momentum with a speech in Wisconsin: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

Lord a-mighty this is exactly why I did not want to remain in Washington and wade into the middle of this Biden-Trump rematch.

Well, that and the heat and humidity, the bureaucracy and the sheer burnout on being in one place for too long.

I could feel trouble brewing in my bones, like an arthritic can tell you it’s going to rain. The signs were all there in between the headlines for months, like the signs in the tea leaves or the Tarot cards.

Knowing that the public has grown wary of polls since 2016, I’ve also shied away from spending a lot of time analyzing and reporting on them. But since it’s now July, and the critical elections of 2024 are just four months away, it might be time to start paying attention again.

I also understand that Democrats especially are mad at The New York Times again for focusing on Joe Biden’s halting debate performance more so than on Trump’s lies, and for calling on Biden to step aside to allow Democrats to consider alternatives at the convention in Chicago August 19-22. It would be interesting to see some younger Democrats take a crack at it in an open convention, although of course it would be very messy and could just make the chaos worse.

A popular meme now going around on Facebook, as Democrats express their anger at the New York Times: NAJ screen shot

I dealt with that last week, however, pointing out that a decision that disruptive and monumental would be up to the candidate himself and his family, not the news media, other Democrats or the army of bots and meme sharers on social media.

NAJ: The Future is Up to Joe and Jill Biden: What Path Will They Choose?

I tend to agree that there should be calls asking the question:

Where are the Republicans who are standing up and asking and pressuring Trump to step down?

He’s still the most unqualified candidate ever, and proved with his first shot how corrupt he was to the core of his selfish being. No amount of pressure from inside the Deep State could change him or encourage him to act like a real president. He used his position for personal gain like no one we’ve ever seen in the Oval Office, proving he was the worst nightmare of those who conceived of a democratic Republic in Philadelphia in 1776.

But since there appear to be no Republicans with integrity going after Trump, save Liz Cheney, what’s the news media to do?

Another related story that is making the rounds on social media involved an expose of Project 2025, a policy and staffing playbook assembled by allies of Trump, first thought up by conservatives at the Heritage Foundation think tank and supported by dozens of aligned groups.

As we already reported, it proposes an overhaul of the federal government under a new Republican administration that would fundamentally change the United States of America from a democratic Republic into a crypto-fascist dictatorship overnight, although none of the groups admit that’s the actual purpose of the plan. They couch it in terms about a different kind of democracy, one that favors white nationalism and infuses Christianity into every department of government at all levels and every aspect of American life – literally destroying the wall of separation between church and state the founders insisted was necessary. To put it in philosophical language, this would be considered a “necessary condition” for an independent democracy to survive and thrive.

The First Amendment’s establishment clause on freedom of religion was meant to protect all forms of worship, not just Christianity. The only way a free and independent democratic Republic could work, they believed, was to allow everyone the freedom to worship but to keep it out of politics and government. Of course the right-wing white nationalist Christians don’t believe that. Apparently they want to go back to a system with an authoritarian leader, if not a monarchy and a king, where the dominant church holds sway over government policy.

As Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore put it, his idea is to put God “back in His place” above the government. This was his twisted view of what society’s organizational chart should look like. But as I told him to his face, this is not a democracy or a Republic. This would be a theocracy run by a strongman dictator who goes along with anything the dominant religion demands, including banning and burning books and closing libraries. Of course they will ban all abortions and birth control, no matter what affect that has on society at large.

Biden is Running: Campaign Goes After Project 2025

It is time to start paying attention again, and there is no better source of data for understanding where this race stands than the New York Times website. Ignore it at your peril.

I know people also don’t like it because you are required to pay for it and many can’t afford it. I understand. The digital divide is real. Which is one reason I take the time to summarize the most important stuff and post the information here where you don’t have to pay for it.

To the money men, let me just say, that in my humble opinion, if the New York Times is going to remain the national news source of record like it claimed in the mass circulation daily newspaper days, you should be able to find the revenue stream to fund this profitably – while also making it FREE online for all, so everybody could then have a chance to be an educated citizen to participate in a working, functioning, democracy.

The problem, as I have written ad nauseam, is that from the early days of the web, Google set ad rates at only a penny a click. What I’ve humbly suggested is why can’t we make it two cents a page view? A little raise? If that were the case, I would be making a living off the money from the traffic we get, when users SEE an ad on the PAGE. Google can’t afford a mere two pennies when someone sees the ad? This is unreasonable? Google has at least $108 billion available cash on hand.

Alphabet cash on hand for the quarter ending March 31, 2024 was $108.090B,

But you can’t ignore this.

“Donald J. Trump’s lead over President Biden in national polls has widened since their debate last week,” says Jonathan Ellis, deputy editor of The Upshot. “Before the debate, Trump’s lead in our national polling average was one percentage point (well within the margin of error); now, with the latest New York Times/Siena College poll included in the average, it’s three points.”

Well, actually five points in key polls, well outside the margin of error.

NYTimes: Election 2024 Polls: Biden vs. Trump: Updated July 6, 2024

Trump is also now leading in the key swing states – the battlegrounds where this election will be won or lost – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. And most of those contests are now outside the margin of error. This is NOT good. There is not much time to turn things around.

If you dig down into the demographics on some of these polls, you will see trouble ahead for Biden that matches up with exactly what cost Hillary Clinton the election in 2016: Black, male voters in urban and suburban areas of key cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Milwaukee and Detroit.

Women will still overwhelmingly support the Democratic nominee, even if it remains Joe Biden, and that includes Black women. Young people are all over the place, so who knows what they will do come Nov. 5? Some of them might even swing for independent Robert Kennedy Jr. or another third party candidate. Whether that helps or hurts Trump or Biden more nobody knows at this point. It could be a wash.

Party Divide

And here’s another thing that is now as obvious as the extreme heat in July.

While Democrats remained largely united behind Biden in 2020 and went along during the primaries in the spring, Biden’s debate performance and the flood of publicity about it has divided the party again, just like it always used to be divided. Democrats are arguing with each other again all over social media, even going so far as to unfriend and block anyone who disagrees with them or shares New York Times news links. They claim to be dropping their digital subscriptions to the Times in droves.

Luckily in my case, not many people see the news links anyway, since the Meta algorithm and bots go out of their way to hide external links so people don’t leave Facebook, Instagram or Threads to read an actual news story on a news website. If you look at it in the app version of those programs on your phone, we don’t get the traffic or the hits anyway. Meta just takes a picture of the articles and renders them inside the app. Another reason they should be sued like the crooks they are.

Most people now get their news from celebrity talking heads on cable news talk anyway. I can only assume that the intra-party fight has also exploded there, even though as I like to point out from time to time, MSNBC is owned by Comcast and CNN is owned by AT&T. Do people really trust the celebrities pretending to be journalists working for the mainstream, corporate news media? Why? I have no stomach to watch this circus anymore, even if I was in a position to get access to cable. And for the record, I don’t like or eat popcorn anymore.

Since the power of the press in this country appears largely dead these days anyway, I’m spending some time on an organic vegetable farm in Maryland learning about how to grow healthy food. We will start picking tomatoes on Monday. I’m focused on not just surviving, but savoring life by eating well. You can see me talk more about that on Facebook if you are so inclined.

But I figure no matter who is elected in November, we still need to eat, and preferably eat healthy. If we have to all flee to Canada to escape the Trump dictatorship next year, I’ll know something about how to help the farmers in Canada grow better tomatoes, like the ones they grow on Sand Mountain in Alabama, where the key to the taste is the lime in the soil.

Wish us luck, dear hobbits and bots. When you finally get ready to join the global warming and climate change migration, I know a great mountain retreat where we can do it and survive maybe, where it’s cool and mostly bug free in the higher elevations, at least at night and in the morning. And there’s plenty of rainfall, unlike out West, with lots of fresh water and locally grown produce.

I aspire to start a hippie commune farm of sorts in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. Will anyone join me and help finance the plan? Or are you just going to sit there baking in the heat in your suburban environs in lost cause places like Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas? I know it’s hard to think about leaving the place you came from.

But I did it. You can too. You might have to before it’s all over. Think about it.

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Glynn Wilson is an expert on public opinion as an academic researcher and a journalist. He minored in Political Science with a major in Journalism and Communications at the University of Alabama in an undergraduate BA program back in the early 1980s, where he took every class offered related to this specialty. He also spent some time working with the Capstone Poll in those days, run by Political Science Professor Pat Cotter, and journalism professor Jim Stovall. He covered public opinion for newspapers after that for 10 years as part of the beat of covering public affairs and politics, including elections. He then went back to grad school at UA in the mid-1990s. One of his graduate research jobs was to oversee the public opinion lab in the College of Communications, also under the leadership of Stovall and Cotter, who conducted most of the political election polls in Alabama for a couple of decades. Wilson’s academic research specialty was in the area of media effects on public opinion. He later worked toward a Ph.D. in this research, but rather than continue teaching and jump through the final hoop of defending a dissertation at the University of Tennessee, he opted to go back into the news business working for The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times and other publications. He went independent on the web in 2005, and has covered public opinion ever since as one of his many specialty beats.

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