“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
The Republican National Convention changed the course of the 2020 presidential election and set President Donald Trump on the road to re-election.
Pollsters are still measuring the bounce Trump got from the RNC, but early results show it hit home with the most decisive group of voters.
“The election is going to be won and lost by independents,” pollster Lee Carter told “Fox and Friends” on Friday. “Independents are lining up much more with the president than we saw last week with Joe Biden.”
Former Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota said that Trump already had a “disturbingly big lead among independents” before the four-day convention.
Even the president’s most vocal critics expect his speech to move the needle with voters. “I think it’s important to note that I do expect there to be some sort of narrowing in the polls,” said CNN news anchor Jake Tapper. Dana Bash agreed that the speech featured the president’s “strongest” attacks on Biden yet.
Former Clinton pollster Doug Schoen called Trump’s acceptance speech “highly effective” and “one of the best speeches of his political career.”
Trump’s strong convention performance makes a stark contrast with Joe Biden’s online Democratic National Convention, which may have backfired.
Three polls—Reuters/Ipsos, CBS News, and Morning Consult tracking poll—found that Joe Biden got no bounce from the convention.
Democrats’ dark themes of America’s “systemic racism,” unfairness, and spreading coronavirus may have actually set Joe Biden back with voters. The Biden/Harris campaign lost three points during the DNC, according to a Rasmussen poll.
That poll shows the candidates “are now running neck-and-neck,” with Biden’s one-point lead within the margin of error.
Even before the successful RNC, Biden’s lead in swing states was narrow or non-existent, and it’s now in free fall.
The New York Times ran a story this week showing that the convention, and Democrats’ refusal to condemn looting and arson, is driving voters in must-win Wisconsin to Trump.
“The Democratic agenda to me right now is America is…evil,” Kenosha voter John Geraghty said. The burning city’s Democrats said they will switch to the president in 2020.
“The bottom line is this: Optimism wins,” said Ed Rollins, who managed Ronald Reagan’s landslide 1984 re-election campaign. “President Trump will win because he believes in America.”
The Trump campaign has reason to be optimistic when you compare Joe Biden’s standing in the polls with Hillary Clinton’s at the same time four years ago.
Hillary Clinton got a four-point bounce in the polls after her convention.
Joe Biden has a seven-point lead over Donald Trump in national polls. But at this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton led Trump by 10 points, and the experts predicted she would win the election in a rout.
“We are starting to hear the faint rumblings of a Hillary Clinton landslide,” said Tim Malloy of the Quinnipiac poll on August 25, 2016.
Joe Biden’s favorability rating is 13 points higher than Donald Trump’s—but Hillary had a 16-point approval rating lead over candidate Trump in 2016.
And CNN found that Biden is four points less popular with black voters than Hillary before her unsuccessful election—and that was before the RNC speakers like Herschel Walker, Burgess Owens, and Ann Dorn made a strong pitch to black voters.
Meanwhile, Trump is holding his core voters and growing with independents.
A CBS News poll taken after the Democratic convention found that Trump has a lock on his base, with 93 percent of Republicans saying they will vote for Trump in November. And he has a 10-point lead among registered independents, who make up the biggest group of American voters.
And there’s every reason to believe more Americans support President Trump than the polls will ever capture.
“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,” Bloomberg News—owned by former Democratic presidential hopeful and anti-Trump megadonor Michael Bloomberg—reported Friday.
Almost two-out-of-three Americans say they feel like they have to censor their political opinions, but the fear isn’t spread evenly along the political spectrum.
“58% of staunch liberals feel they can say what they believe,” according to Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute, but more than three-out-of-four conservatives say they can’t talk about their views in public. https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/62-of-americans-afraid-to-share-political-views/
“I suspect there is at least a point or two of undercount for Trump voters,” said NeverTrump Republican consultant Steve Schmidt, who’s backing Joe Biden this year.
The only polling group that accurately predicted President Trump winning Michigan in 2016, the Trafalgar Group, says their polls show an even higher number of “silent” Trump voters this year. And Minnesota, which Hillary Clinton narrowly won, is tied.
Trump’s successful convention may have just given him the boost he needs to take the lead and never look back.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”