I have to hand it the GOP, I did not expect the Republican National Convention to be as effective and good as it was.
It was the greatest show on earth for those four nights, driving home messaging that was extremely damaging to Joe Biden and reaching out to voter groups that are not traditional Republican voters.
Compare the claustrophobic Biden finale:
With the glorious Trump finale. Melanias spectacular lime-green dress stood out, and had the wife (my wife) in awe.
Don’t take my word for it. Bill Maher is nervous: “I feel very nervous, the same way I did four years ago this time.”
The initial polling shows Biden’s almost double-digit national polling lead cut almost in half. Both Morning Consult and Yahoo/YouGov polls show a substantial bump for Trump.
There also are a lot of articles appearing in liberal publications warning of the hidden Trump vote. One of the most interesting is from the NY Times on how conservatives dominate Facebook in a world the mainstream media doesn’t see, What if Facebook Is the Real ‘Silent Majority’?:
Listen, liberals. If you don’t think Donald Trump can get re-elected in November, you need to spend more time on Facebook.Since the 2016 election, I’ve been obsessively tracking how partisan political content is performing on Facebook, the world’s largest and arguably most influential media platform. Every morning, one of the first browser tabs I open is CrowdTangle — a handy Facebook-owned data tool that offers a bird’s-eye view of what’s popular on the platform. I check which politicians and pundits are going viral. I geek out on trending topics. I browse the previous day’s stories to see which got the most reactions, shares and comments.Most days, the leader board looks roughly the same: conservative post after conservative post, with the occasional liberal interloper. (If you want to see these lists for yourselves, you can check out @FacebooksTop10, a Twitter account I created that shows the top 10 most-interacted-with link posts by U.S. Facebook pages every day.) ….But what sticks out, when you dig in to the data, is just how dominant the Facebook right truly is. Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition….Maybe Mr. Trump’s “silent majority,” in other words, only seems silent because we’re not looking at their Facebook feeds.
Bloomberg News also reports on a study suggesting the polls are missing Trump voters:
A new online study finds that Republicans and independents are twice as likely as Democrats to say they would not give their true opinion in a telephone poll question about their preference for president in the 2020 election. That raises the possibility that polls understate support for President Donald Trump….Political party preference was the only characteristic that correlated consistently with reluctance to share presidential preference, Leib says. There was no correlation with age, race, education, or income.
But there’s one other factor that is a tell. When the Democratic National Convention concluded, the Biden campaign indicated that Biden would continue his virtual campaign for the foreseeable future. Then came the RNC, and now Biden is doing more TV interviews and is hitting the campaign trail after Labor Day:
Joe Biden’s coronavirus campaign is coming to an end.The Democratic presidential nominee who had halted nearly all campaign travel since the pandemic struck in March said on Thursday he plans to return to the trail, likely after Labor Day.
But it’s more than that. The battleground states are essentially in a dead heat in the polling, which probably means Trump is ahead. The Biden campaign clearly is doing its own polling, and they are sufficiently worred that Biden will be visiting in person Minnesota and Wisconsin after Labor Day.
John Hinderaker at Power Line writes that Biden’s new travel plans confirm his battleground polling problems:
But don’t take my word for it: the Biden campaign has implicitly confirmed that their polling, too, shows that Minnesota is in play. On Thursday, Bidenannounced that Minnesota and Wisconsin are among the states he plans to visit, in person, after Labor Day. That is good news if you are a Trump supporter. I don’t think there is any reasonable scenario on which Biden can win the election if he loses Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Joe Biden is going to Minnesota and Wisconsin. His internal polls must be worrying his handlers. The RNC destroyed his basement campaign.
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