We begin with two forlorn non-music anniversaries. Today in 1897, Oldsmobile began operation, eventually to become a division of General Motors Corp. … but not anymore.
No comments on Presty the DJ for Aug. 21
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Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones released the song that would become their first number one hit, and yet Mick Jagger still claimed …
Today in 1967, the New York Times reported on a method of reducing the noise recording devices make during recording. The inventor, Ray Dolby, had pioneered the process for studio recordings, but the Times story mentioned its potential for home use.
Ray Dolby, by the way, is no known relation to the other Dolby …
Today in 1987, Lindsey Buckingham refused to go out on tour with Fleetwood Mac for its “Tango in the Night” album, perhaps thinking that the road would make him …
The band probably told him …
… but look who came back a few years later …
… only to be told don’t stop at the studio door.
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How much money would you have paid for tickets for this concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco today in 1964:
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David Gross writes to Generation X:
Like any sensible adult, you know that the world is full of dangers. From gun violence to heart attacks, there are any number of ways that you could meet an untimely end. But you know how you’re probably not going to die today? Quicksand.
Which is vaguely disappointing. Growing up in a pre-internet age, when most of what we knew of the outside world came from pop culture and hearsay from friends, we were led to believe that the dangers facing us in adulthood would be a bit more colorful and zany.
Here are 10 of our favorite childhood misconceptions about the threats that awaited us when we left the security of home. What did we miss? Leave a comment below and tell us some of the crazy things you believed as a kid.
1. Quicksand
We can all thank The NeverEnding Story (RIP Artax, a beautiful horse who deserved better) for supplanting logic with this seemingly never-ending fear. But it’s time to let it go. You don’t just have to take our word for it — scientists at the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institutein Amsterdam studied quicksand in 2005 and found that it’s “impossible” for a human to be sucked completely under.
I have not seen “The NeverEnding Story,” but I vaguely recall a movie, possibly with Sherlock Holmes, with a character drowning in a bog.
2. Snakes
If snakes are terrifying to Indiana Jones, it’s more than understandable that they would bring most of us into a state of full-blown panic. They slither, bite and rattle, and those with a menacing hood even became synonymous with a highly problematic dojo, not to mention G.I. Joe’s main archnemesis. But despite the villainous rap we’ve bestowed on them, mosquitoes kill nearly 15 times more people a year than all snakes put together. Ssssssssomething to think about.
Sssssss?
I saw “Sssssss” on TV. The (spoiler alert!) metamorphosis sequence freaked me out.
3. The Bermuda Triangle
What has become a maritime Area 51 of sorts, the large body of water known as the Bermuda Triangle is infamously known as a location where numerous flights have disappeared without explanation. But, in actuality, no more flight accidents have occurred there than any other part of the world. Like the punk rocker who secretly loves Barry Manilow, the Bermuda Triangle is a bit of a poser.
Tell Leonard Nimoy that.
4. Escaping dangerous situations by dropping and rolling
Stop, drop and roll was the crisis management mantra of our youth. It started to fall by the wayside once we, as a society, stopped being so stingy with fire extinguishers.
5. Falling pianos
Once upon a time, it seemed people were at real risk of being crushed by a piano at any given moment, a phenomenon known as the Wile E. Coyote Effect.
6. Hidden satanic messages in music
“Have I become satanic yet?” you may have wondered, based on the public outcry and congressional hearings that took place in an effort to stymie popular music’s perceived penchant for the occult. Yet, no matter how hard we rebelliously rocked out, performing ritual sacrifices in our basements never became a thing.
This dates back to the suicides of two heavy metal fans in December 1985. Their families sued the band Judas Priest, claiming that subliminal messages in its Stained Class album. Ultimate Classic Rock takes the story from there:
The legal protection of lyrics as free speech had already been tested (perhaps most notably during a roughly concurrent trial accusing Ozzy Osbourne of driving a fan to suicide with his song “Suicide Solution”), but the Priest case proceeded thanks to a legal twist: Without commenting on whether or not the songs in question actually included subliminal messages, the presiding judge ruled that so-called “subliminals” don’t constitute actual speech – and are therefore not protected by the First Amendment.
“I don’t know what subliminals are, but I do know there’s nothing like that in this music,” band manager Bill Curbishley complained before the trial. “If we were going to do that, I’d be saying, ‘Buy seven copies,’ not telling a couple of screwed-up kids to kill themselves.”
That rather compelling argument notwithstanding, the case proceeded to trial, with the plaintiffs’ attorney penning an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that called the alleged messages (which were said to include the phrases “let’s be dead” and “do it”) an “invasion of privacy” and quoted Jimi Hendrix as saying, “You can hypnotize people with music and when they get at their weakest point, you can preach into their subconscious minds what you want to say.”
That Hendrix quote has elsewhere been attributed to Charles Manson’s brother Eddy, and the lawyer’s apparent misquote seems to reflect an overall loose approach to substantiating its claims. In an article for the Skeptical Inquirer, Dr. Timothy E. Moore – who served as a witness for the defense – rather drolly recalled one of the prosecution’s experts by suggesting, “It is possible that he undermined his own credibility with the court by opining that subliminal messages could be found on Ritz crackers, the Sistine Chapel, Sears catalogues, and the NBC evening news. He also asserted that ‘science is pretty much what you can get away with at any point in time.’”
In fact, the band’s management coordinator Jayne Andrews later incredulously noted that the plaintiffs had at first planned to hinge their case on lyrics from the album – lyrics that didn’t exist. “It was originally about the track ‘Heroes End,’” Andrews recalled. “They tried to say the band were saying you could only be a hero if you killed yourself, till I had to give them the correct lyrics which is ‘why do heroes have to die?’… Then they changed their plea to subliminal messages on the album!”
Guitarist Glenn Tipton later conceded, “It’s a fact that if you play speech backwards, some of it will seem to make sense. So, I asked permission to go into a studio and find some perfectly innocent phonetic flukes. The lawyers didn’t want to do it, but I insisted. We bought a copy of the Stained Class album in a local record shop, went into the studio, recorded it to tape, turned it over and played it backwards. Right away we found ‘Hey ma, my chair’s broken’ and ‘Give me a peppermint’ and ‘Help me keep a job.’”
More damning was testimony from Vance himself, who told attorneys that he and Belknap were listening to Judas Priest when “all of a sudden we got a suicide message, and we got tired of life.” In a letter to Belknap’s mother, he later wrote, “I believe that alcohol and heavy-metal music such as Judas Priest led us to be mesmerized.” The Belknaps’ attorney argued that “Judas Priest and CBS pander this stuff to alienated teenagers. The members of the chess club, the math and science majors don’t listen to this stuff. It’s the dropouts, the drug and alcohol abusers. So, our argument is you have a duty to be more cautious when you’re dealing with a population susceptible to this stuff.”
The label’s lawyers didn’t try to deny that Vance and Belknap led what they deemed “sad and miserable lives” – but they pointed the finger at the boys’ overall environment, upbringing, and life choices, going over how difficult it had been for both men to hold steady jobs or stay out of trouble with the law. The defense also attacked what White referred to as “junk science” in his article, with attorney Suellen Fulstone arguing, “The courtroom is no place for reveries about the unknown capacity of the human mind.”
Despite the apparently flimsy nature of the case, the trial went on for more than a month. “We had to sit in this courtroom in Reno for six weeks,” singer Rob Halford would subsequently lament. “It was like Disney World. We had no idea what a subliminal message was – it was just a combination of some weird guitar sounds, and the way I exhaled between lyrics. I had to sing ‘Better by You, Better Than Me’ in court, a cappella. I think that was when the judge thought, ‘What am I doing here? No band goes out of its way to kill its fans.’”
Now, back to the list:
7. Dysentery
“Can everyone please stop getting dysentery?!” you may have one day shouted from your school’s computer lab. The Oregon Trail led to a great amount of dysentery hysteria as wagon mate after wagon mate succumbed to the deadly infection. Thankfully, those dastardly days are over, and we can all put that unpleasant mess in the, well, rear.
8. Piranhas
As it turns out, the chance of being slowly lowered into a tank of piranhas by a nefarious criminal mastermind is quite low. And, unless they’re starving, piranhas don’t actually like to eat people. Now I simply feel sorry for all the piranhas whose owners don’t feed them a proper diet.
9. Acid rain
“It’s rain! And it’s acid! And it’s falling on all of us!” seemed like declarations we were all destined to make. But this is something we actually fixed with the passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and other regulatory measures. It’s still hard to reconcile because we’ve been so well trained to believe that things will keep getting worse.
What an illiberal thought.
10. Chloroform
I still don’t know where one even gets chloroform but, growing up, it sure seemed widely available to anyone looking to kidnap and shove someone into the trunk of a car. Now, if chloroform crosses your path, it’s probably just what the kids have dubbed their latest strain of weed.
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Country music has had a tumultuous year, with hit songs advocating (to some) vigilantism …
… and (according to left-wing idiots, but I repeat myself) lynching or something:
And now, apparently not to the airwaves, enter Oliver Anthony …
… about which Christian Britschgi writes:
The internet (or at least the most “online” right-wing corners of it) is abuzz about the hit new song “Rich Men North of Richmond” from heretofore unknown country/folk singer Oliver Anthony.
Released late last week, the song features a solo Anthony on his guitar as he belts out, with great sorrow and personal hurt, lyrics complaining about the falling value of the dollar, the heavy burden of taxation, welfare recipients’ purchase of junk food, and the sex trafficking shenanigans of Jeffrey Epstein.
These ills and many others can be blamed, as the title suggests, on “those rich men north of Richmond” and their totalitarian aspirations.
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do
Anti-elitism is not the most novel sentiment for a folky country song.
Still, some genuinely funny lines (“I wish politicians would look out for miners, and not just minors on an island somewhere,” and “if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds”) made funnier still by Anthony’s incongruously soulful performance add life and originality to the song’s generic populism.
Sure, one might quibble with the idea that food stamps are primarily responsible for driving up taxes and inflation, even if they are spent on fudge rounds. But the song’s not meant to be a white paper. If you don’t take it too seriously, you can have a fun and light-hearted time jamming out to the surprise viral hit.
Regrettably, people have begun to take the song much too seriously indeed. Rolling Stone notes that the song has been a hit with much of the online right, which has treated the song as this generation’s ballad for the forgotten man.
Conservative personality Matt Walsh praised it for supposedly injecting some flesh-and-blood beauty into this sterile world. “The main reason this song resonates with so many people isn’t political. It’s because the song is raw and authentic. We are suffocated by artificiality,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Over at The Federalist, Samuel Mangold-Lenett describes the song as “a haunting, bittersweet lamentation for an America that existed not too long ago but may never exist again” and one that “depicts a deep yearning to return to a version of America in which people were not plagued by existential economic and cultural woes every moment of every day.”
The love fest is not an exclusively right-wing affair either. Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) sees within the lyrics a “path to realignment.” Now that rural voters’ hearts have been laid bare by the song, they can be won back over to progressive politics.
Perhaps this reaction is what one might expect for a song with lyrics that are themselves a little “too online.” Nevertheless, people need to get a grip.
Contra Walsh, the right-wing meme politics running through the lyrics is exactly why the song resonates with people. If the song were instead an authentic recounting of getting drunk or being unemployed, the track probably would have gotten about as much attention as Anthony’s earlier releases.
Sad country songs speaking to poverty and social anomie didn’t start with food stamps and “Epstein didn’t kill himself” memes. Something tells me that the people who kept coal country folk songs like “Which Side Are You On?” alive had some economic and cultural anxieties as well. And the fact that Anthony has the musical equipment and technology necessary to sound good and reach a mass audience from his backyard suggests the times we live in aren’t so lean after all.
And while it gives me no pleasure to burst the bubble on Murphy’s working-class realignment, not every song sung by a sad guy with a guitar is a window into the soul of blue-collar America. The Epstein lyrics probably should have made that clear.
Still, just because Matt Walsh and Chris Murphy like the “Rich Men North of Richmond” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Like other pieces of right-wing musical media (think MAGA rap), it’s catchy and fun. It’s even more fun when you don’t take it that seriously.
Yesterday, I wrote on the Corner a critique of the message in Oliver Anthony’s viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The response to that short post has been universally negative. Along with dozens and dozens of four-letter-word epithets directed my way, I was told that my view was clearly out of touch, elitist, and condescending. Why was I criticizing the passion of this man who has so rightly noticed “what this world’s gotten to”? Am I blind or indifferent to the struggles, the suicides, the wrecked lives of blue-collar American men? Sohrab Ahmari, writing in the American Conservative, labeled me a “hunky-dory con,” adding that “Hunky-dory conservatism might please the right’s donor class, but it alienates the millions who can’t detect reality in its rosy picture of the world.”
Surely I must be one of those rich men living north of Richmond to be so arrogant and callous.
Well, I’m neither callous nor indifferent to the suffering out there. I’m not attacking Oliver Anthony personally or disparaging his character. Indeed, I called the epidemic of overdoses, suicides, and deaths of despair a “tragedy” and a “catastrophe.” And, as I wrote, I don’t think that the federal government or our national leadership has been an innocent bystander in any of this. Of course the government has wasted avalanches of money, stoked inflation, and made it harder for your dollar to stretch to the end of the month.
But you won’t convince me that the first-, second-, and third-most important factors in the fracturing of our society hasn’t been — us. We the People have been the cause of our decline.
On the economics, Ahmari writes, “real wages for the bottom half of American workers have been stagnant for the better part of two generations.” That’s a debatable assertion at best — see Michael Strain’s book The American Dream Is Not Dead — but as I see it, where the rubber hits the road, that’s not the biggest issue by far.
There are, according to a recent report from the U.S. Chamber, 9.6 million job openings in the U.S. and 5.8 million unemployed workers. Worse, the labor-force participation rate (Americans who have a job or are actively looking for one) has been falling steadily for two decades, roughly the period that Ahmari has identified — from 67 percent in 2001 to 62.6 percent today. If you talk to anyone who hires people or runs a business, the No. 1 comment you receive is, “We can’t find enough good applicants.” But are these jobs well-paying enough? Are there good blue-collar jobs out there through which young men can earn a living, build skills, and support a family? Yes, there are. In fact, there are serious shortages of good workers in the building trades. And I know that the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy will pay you tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses to ship to boot camp on short notice. So yes, as I wrote, “if you live in the United States of America in 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working ‘overtime hours for bullshit pay,’ you need to find a new job.”
We all know this is true. Even Ohio senator J.D. Vance, now a leading NatCon, knows it’s true. He wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy that “Nobel-winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites.”
What they mean is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle-class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees. Fair enough — I worry about those things, too. But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.
The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly toss aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America [emphasis added].
That cultural rot doesn’t sound very hunky-dory to me, Sohrab.
Again, government hasn’t helped, but no, you won’t convince me that the course of our lives isn’t primarily a function of our own choices. I have been on jobsites and personally witnessed the new guy not come back after lunch. I’ve watched friends with a baby on the way choose unemployment and drugs. I know young men who’ve thrown away their chances. Indeed, that young man was once me — and could still be me — if I had not looked a mentor in the eye and taken his direct advice to stop screwing around, grow up, and get to work.
For the record, I’m not a rich man living north of Richmond. I’m an Okie, living in my hometown. I was raised in a middle-class family. I worked my way through college. I mowed lawns, built fences, and stood the closing shift at a convenience store. After school, I roughnecked in the west Texas oilfields for two years to pay off my student loans. Later, I joined the Marine Corps and served in the infantry. I’ve followed work to four different states and moved my family three times in seven years. My hands are rough and calloused. I know blue-collar work and what it’s like to make ends meet on blue-collar pay.
But you know what? If I had been born a trust-fund baby, if I had been schooled at Phillips Academy and Harvard, if I worked at a desk at Goldman Sachs’s offices in Manhattan and my uncalloused hands had never done a day of manual labor in my live-long life, this timeless advice would still hold true:
We, as citizens, as men, still hold it in our power to ignore the corrosive effects of our politics and the popular culture and get on with living the good life: get a job, get married, raise your kids up right, get involved with your church, read good books, teach your boys to hunt, be present in the lives of your family and friends, help your neighbors.
It’s not condescending to speak the truth.
Wright sounds like this non-recent non-country song:
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How can two songs be the number one song in the country today in 1956? Do a Google search for the words “B side”:
(Those songs, by the way, were the first Elvis recorded with his fantastic backup singers, the Jordanaires.)
Today in 1962, the Beatles made their debut with their new drummer, Ringo Starr, following a two-hour rehearsal.
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In May the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:
Wisconsin’s Legislature and Gov. Tony Evers need to approve a plan to finance $448 million of long-term renovations at American Family Field — or perhaps risk the Milwaukee Brewers moving to another city.
That’s the indirect message delivered Thursday by Major League Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred on a visit to Milwaukee − part of a series of visits Manfred makes to MLB cities.
To be sure, Manfred didn’t explicitly say the Brewers might leave Milwaukee once the team’s lease of American Family Field expires at the end of 2030. And the ballclub’s principal owner, Mark Attanasio, has said repeatedly he wants the team to stay in Milwaukee for the long term.
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The Beatles were never known for having wild concerts. (Other than their fans, that is.)
Today in 1960, the Beatles played their first of 48 appearances at the Indra Club in Hamburg, West Germany. The Indra Club’s owner asked the Beatles to put on a “mach shau.” The Beatles responded by reportedly screaming, shouting, leaping around the stage, and playing lying on the floor of the club. John Lennon reportedly made a stage appearance wearing only his underwear, and also wore a toilet seat around his neck on stage. As they say, Sei vorsichtig mit deinen Wünschen.
Four years later, the council of Glasgow, Scotland, required that men who had Beatles haircuts would have to wear swimming caps in city pools, because men’s hair was clogging the pool filters.
Today in 1968, the Doors had their only number one album, “Waiting for the Sun”:
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President Trump now has, I believe, 90 or 91 counts filed against him by a parade of prosecutorial clowns and their Grand Juries that were hand picked from districts that are overwhelmingly Democrat and overwhelmingly Trump hating.
For a little context as to just how outrageous this process is, I jumped in the Wayback Machine with Mr. Peabody and Sherman again, and here is a little sample of the post-2016 election reactions from Democrats and their media allies:
- Politico on November 22, 2016: “At least a half-dozen Democratic electors have signed onto an attempt to block Donald Trump from winning an Electoral College majority, an effort designed not only to deny Trump the presidency but also to undermine the legitimacy of the institution.”
- Politico on December 14, 2016: “An anti-Trump activist has begun running full-page ads in newspapers across the country to persuade Electoral College members to “vote their conscience” as part of a pressure campaign intended to block the election of Donald Trump. The ads, which appeared Wednesday morning in the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Austin American-Statesman, Salt Lake City Tribune and Tampa Bay Times, are also slated to appear in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Wisconsin State Journal on Thursday. The 538 members of the Electoral College are slated to meet Monday in their respective state capitals. The ads target Republican electors in states won by Trump.”
- CNN on December 15, 2016: “Amid the last month’s exhausting drama around Cabinet picks and presidential tweetstorms, one date stands out – December 19, the day the Electoral College picks our next president. As hope from Jill Stein’s recount fades for Hillary Clinton’s supporters, another Hail Mary chance to thwart Donald Trump’s presidency has taken its place: that enough members of the Electoral College sworn to vote for Trump will break their pledge and vote to elect an alternate candidate. America needs 37 “faithless electors” from states Trump won to do this in order to drop him below the 270 threshold and block him from automatically winning the White House.”
- Vox on December 19, 2016: “Donald Trump won last month’s presidential election. But many liberals and progressives are still clinging to one faint, almost-certainly-doomed hope that he can be blocked from the presidency — through the Electoral College. That’s because the November 8 vote was technically not to make Trump president, but only to determine who 538 electors in various states across the country will be. It is those electors who will cast the votes that legally elect the president on Monday, December 19. In modern times, the casting of electoral votes has been a purely ceremonial occasion in which the state results from Election Day have been rubber-stamped. This year, there’s more drama — because there’s been a highly unusual effort to convince Trump-supporting electors to simply not vote for Trump.”
- CBS News on December 21, 2016: “A historic number of “faithless” electors — seven in total–each cast their ballots on Monday for a candidate other than the one who won his or her state.”
- Newsweek on January 6, 2017: “U.S. Democratic lawmakers planned to challenge President-elect Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory on Friday in a largely symbolic move that is unlikely to gain traction in the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress but exposes lingering dismay over a contentious election campaign.”
- Paul Krugman in the NYT on January 16, 2017 about Democrat Congressman John Lewis: “Now Mr. Lewis says that he won’t attend the inauguration of Donald Trump, whom he regards as an illegitimate president.”
- The Hill on May 24, 2017: “According to data from the latest Harvard-Harris poll provided exclusively to The Hill, 68 percent of voters said Democrats have not accepted that Trump won fairly and is a legitimate president. That figure includes 69 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of independents and 65 percent of Democrats. Only four months into Trump’s presidency, Democrats have openly discussed impeachment and have accused the president of colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election, as well as trying to block investigations into the matter.”
- Washington Post on September 26, 2019, quoting Hillary Clinton: “No, it doesn’t kill me because he knows he’s an illegitimate president. I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”
Consider the legal actions following post-2016 presidential election:
- Total number of Grand Juries convened: 0
- Total number of indictments: 0
- Total number of arrests: 0
- Total number of convictions: 0
- Total number of politicians and lawyers facing criminal action for expressing opinions: 0
That doesn’t include the 2017 Inauguration Day riots in DC or the Democrats constantly calling for violence against Trump, his family and his supporters for his entire term.
Democrats are a plague on the country. Biblical Egypt dodged a bullet.
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The Big Enchilada is whether Trump or Biden will win the general election a little less than 15 months from now. I know, I know, there’s a chance it won’t be either one. Biden is 80 and looking bad. Trump is 77 and considerably overweight. At their ages, “Tomorrow is not promised” is not just an aphorism. Justice Scalia was 79 and to all appearances healthy when he went to bed one night and didn’t get up the next day.
And age is not the only wildcard here. Trump is going to spend the next several months (at least) fighting off four indictments in four different venues. Some of the charges he’ll be required to answer border on frivolous (the Alvin Bragg indictment) but some are more serious and have been launched by a more serious prosecutor (Jack Smith). His getting nominated seems very likely with his big and seemingly stable (or even slightly growing) lead, yes. But criminal litigation is a minefield, and I have seldom seen anyone look good as a criminal defendant, so in my view Trump’s nomination is not guaranteed. The platform, “I am not a criminal” is just not a great look.
Similarly, if Biden becomes more directly and visibly linked to Hunter’s years-long money grubbing schemes — schemes that enriched the Biden family by millions from foreign sources while Joe was Vice President — his aura of harmless Uncle Joe is going to take a beating. Normally, the MSM would cover for him, but this time there are two related possibilities that could make the cover permeable: First, Joe’s “I-know-nothing-about-nothing” story falls apart too obviously to make the usual press muzzing-over possible; and second, the press/Democratic establishment become convinced that Joe has become so tarnished, in addition to so dilapidated, that he’ll probably lose, even to Trump, so someone different is needed.
And there’s this too, which I understand is unkind to put so bluntly, but it’s out there: Joe may be two stumble-and-fall episodes away from being unelectable under any circumstances. After 80, aging doesn’t take captives. The descent tends to be fast and ugly.
Still, as things stand now, the nominees are likely to be Trump and Biden. Current polling has them neck-and-neck. A NYT poll two weeks ago had them tied at 43% each. Today’s Real Clear Politics survey shows that, averaging the six most recent poll results, Trump has a lead of less than one percent. with both candidates around 43%. If you go back to include two earlier polls, Biden has a similarly minuscule lead.
So, putting the wildcard possibilities to one side, who has the advantage?
I think Biden does, for several reasons, the first of which is that Trump is not going to win with 43%, and it’s just very hard to see where the additional, needed votes are coming from.
I mean, really, where are they coming from? Is there anyone out there not living in a cave who doesn’t already have a pretty firm opinion about Donald Trump?
I doubt it, although the NYT, with certain qualifications, says there is. But the news about them isn’t good from Trump’s point of view:
….43 plus 43 obviously does not equal 100. There are also 14 percent of registered voters who declined to choose either candidate. Some of them said that they would not vote next year. Others said they would support a third-party candidate. Still others declined to answer the poll question.
You can think of this 14 percent as the Neither of the Above (NOTA) voters, at least for now. In the end, a significant number of them probably will vote for Biden or Trump and go a long way toward determining who occupies the White House in 2025….
Perhaps the most notable characteristic of NOTA voters is that they are highly critical of Trump. By definition, they are also unenthusiastic about Biden. But they are considerably less happy with Trump:
NOTA voters are more likely than all registered voters to say they believe Trump “has committed serious federal crimes” and more likely to say his behavior after the 2020 election “threatened American democracy.” On both questions, a majority of all registered voters give these anti-Trump answers, but an even larger majority of NOTA voters do:
These patterns are a reminder that most voters have never supported Trump. He won in 2016 despite losing the popular vote, and he generally became less popular during his presidency. His unpopularity helped Democrats retake control of the House in 2018, oust him from the presidency in 2020 and fare much better than expected in the 2022 midterms.
This is an important point if not, for Republican partisans, a particularly welcome one. Trump won in 2016 essentially by drawing an inside straight. Yes, it could happen again, but you wouldn’t want to bet on it. And since then, in terms of electoral clout, it’s been pretty much downhill. The out-party’s (i.e., the Democrats’) re-taking the House in 2018 is no big surprise (being consistent with historical patterns), but Trump’s 2020 loss wasn’t that close, and, as Paul has shown elsewhere on Ringside, there is good reason to think that Trump cost Republicans several Senate seats in 2020 and one or two more last year. In the most recent general elections, Trump has been a net minus.
That’s a message for next year.
Trump and his closest allies in the Republican Party have alienated swing voters, especially in the suburbs. Trump has also helped inspire a continuing surge of turnout among Democratic-leaning young voters in swing states.
There’s a message in that, too.
The suburbs should be a fertile field for the Republican candidate. Suburban voters tend to be more white and more prosperous than city dwellers. They are more tax payers than tax eaters. They tend to have children, and are thus sensitive to candidates’ stands on drugs, crime, and dumbed-down educational standards. But Trump’s carelessness about law and norms, his crudeness, his self-absorption, and his whole persona is toxic to them, and the gains Republicans should make in the suburbs simply are not going to happen if he’s the candidate. That’s just how it is.
A very smart friend of mine, a big star defense lawyer, put it to me this way:
I’m going to borrow from Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade, in the climactic scene of “The Maltese Falcon,” summing up to Brigid O’Shaughnessy just where she stands: “All those are on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won’t argue about that. But look at the number of them. What have we got on the other side?” Not enough, as it turned out, to overcome the number of reasons to doubt her. Same here. With Trump, there’s too much baggage, too much drama, too much enervation — too much to overcome whatever positive attributes he might muster.
We can win next year, we should win, and for the country’s sake we need to win. But if Trump is the candidate, we’re probably going to lose.
Republican voters better figure that out. Whatever good Trump did as president, whether or not he legitimately lost the 2020 election and whether or not Trump is being fairly prosecuted now, the fact is there is no way Trump can win in November 2024.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 