At the end of this column, I’m going to provide – probably foolishly – my predictions for the election. But first, it’s been several days since my last column, so there are many stories deserving mockery:
Immediately prior to this weekend, Joe Biden damaged the Harris/Walz ticket twice. He deflated Kamala’s hysterical prediction that Trump will one day put his enemies in jail by saying that “we should lock [Trump] up!” and he defanged the no-name comedian’s “Puerto Ricans are garbage” gaffe by calling half the country “garbage.”
The story was that Que Mala’s campaign had demanded that he not speak in public until after the election. So I love to picture their consternation when an intern ran into the war room shouting, “Biden has put a foot in his mouth again!”
Biden Hack 1: Oh no, what did he say this time?
Intern: What? No. He didn’t put HIS foot in his mouth. He put a baby’s foot in his mouth, at a Halloween party at the White House.
Hack 1: Gross! But… (looking around at the other flunkies who have sold their souls to Satan)… that’s better, isn’t it? I mean, he didn’t say anything to screw us, right?
Hack 2: I guess. Chewing on babies’ feet is crazy, but everyone knows he’s crazy by now. I think we dodged that bullet.
Hack 1: Whew! Okay, let’s get back to our plans to cheat and steal the vote in battleground states.
Three…hours…lay-tair…
Intern (breathlessly bursting through the door): Biden escaped the White House—
Hack 1: What? How? Tell me he didn’t eat a baby!
Intern (shaking his head and catching his breath): No. He somehow snuck onto a plane to Philly.
Hack 1: Not Pennsylvania! (looking around the table) Who was supposed to be watching him?
Hack 3 (looking at his shoes): Hunter.
Hack 1: Are you Schiffing me? You’re fired! (Hack 3 sadly stands, picks up his notepad and Vape pen and shuffles toward the door.) Is it too late to divert the flight? Possibly to Greenland?
Intern: No, he landed 40 minutes ago.
Hacks 1-13 (minus #3): F**k! S**t!!!
Intern: Secret Service scrambled, and had a car waiting for him on the runway. But he walked right past it and wandered away.
Hack 2: Please god, tell me he walked into a spinning propeller!
Hack 4: Or he stumbled out onto an active runway and a landing jet smashed him!
Intern: No. Secret Service chased him down and got him into the car. Then they took him to a press conference.
Hack 1: What?! No!! We said no talking!
Hack 2: What did he say?
Intern: Well, he talked about back when he was in Scranton.
Hack 4: Oh god.
Intern: And then he said… that… he wanted to smack Trump in the ass.
Hack (dropping his head onto the table): F***! No!
Hack 2 (putting a hand on Hack 1’s shoulder): Wait a minute, hang on. What did he say, exactly?
Hack 4: That might not be so bad, right? All of our voters hate Trump so much, they might not even mind.
Intern: Well, his exact words were, “These are the kind of guys you like to smack in the ass!” Unquote.
Hack 1 (head still on the table): Great. He said it about Trump AND his voters. (Everyone around the table moans.) How are we going to spin this?
A long, painful silence hangs in the air. Finally, Hack 12 – from the far end of the table – says, “Maybe we could say there was an apostrophe in the sentence?”
Hack 1 (head still on the table): You’re fired. Get out. (Hack 12 picks up his vape pen and his crack pipe, and slowly exits.)
Hack 8: Let’s just think about this for a minute. He didn’t say he wants to KICK his ass, right?
Intern (shaking his head): He said, “smack.”
Hack 8: Good. Kicking your ass is violent. But “smacking” your ass is…
Hack 6: Sexual assault? We’re trying to get male votes, and Flat Line says he wants to smack the asses of half the country! How’s that going to play in Peoria?
Hack 5: I wish it was AOC’s ass we were talking about. That might get us a few male votes!
Hack 1 (lifting his head and slumping back into his chair): Why would he be babbling about smacking AOC’s ass? She’s on our side.
Hack 5 (defensively): Well, she’s got a juicy booty, right? (All of the other hacks stare at him balefully, and he holds his hands up, palms out.) Hey, her words, not mine!
Hack 1: But it wasn’t about AOC, was it? It was about Trump and/or his supporters. So where does that leave us?
Hack 2: I only see two options.
Hack 1 (looking at him for a moment, then sighing deeply, defeated): Okay. Raise your hand if you think we should say that the President’s comment was encouraging violence? (Everybody looks at each other. A few hands tentatively go up.)
Hack 1: Okay, now raise your hand if you think we should say that his comment was just meant to be homo-erotic?
And, scene.
Meanwhile, Kamala diverted from a flight to Detroit on Saturday so that she could go to NYC and appear in the cold open of Saturday Night Live. (On the bright side, the poor Detroit residents have suffered enough, and at least they were spared a Kamala speech!) Because if there’s one thing she’s known for, it’s her deft comic touch.
Annnnnnddddd… Yikes! That was one of the most awkward things I’ve ever seen in my life.
And I’ve seen Grandma Squanto trying to drink a beer like a normal person, and Tim Walz trying to load a shotgun, and Donald Trump inviting several of Bill Clinton’s groping victims to his debate with Hillary, where Bill Clinton sat in the front row, sweating like a Que Mala in church.
To top it all off, it turns out that the skit she did – she sat on one side of a “mirror” and talked to Kamala-imitator Maya Rudolph, as if she were having a dialogue with herself – had actually been done before.
In 2015.
By Donald Trump, talking to Jimmy Fallon, who was made up to look like Trump.
You can’t make this stuff up. Kamala has been criticized for stealing Trump’s policy ideas, such as his “no tax on tips” proposal and his advocacy for a border wall. So then she goes on SNL and… rips off the same skit he did 9 years ago! And, as it happens, he was much funnier.
Unexpectedly!
Okay, I am reckless enough that I am going to make a few election predictions. And that’s despite the fact that I did so before the 2022 elections, and was wildly optimistic, and wildly wrong.
I thought that after the first two horrific years of the Biden administration, there would be a red wave, and I predicted something like 53/54 GOP Senate seats and a gain of around 34 House seats. Instead, the Dems held the Senate, and we only picked up a handful of House seats, and then only because there were mini red waves in FL and NY.
So I have a lousy track record at this. But I’m not letting that stop me from trying again.
This time my gut tells me that Trump is going to win, but the polls make little sense to me, as they’re suggesting a lot of contradictory and counter-intuitive outcomes.
First, the “top line” of the polls – suggesting that every battle ground state is practically tied, as is the national popular vote – makes no sense in terms of those same polls’ cross-tabs. How can Trump be way ahead of past races with blacks, Latinos, Jews, young people etc. – not ahead in terms of getting a majority, but ahead of the usual amount by which GOP candidates trail with those groups – and yet be tied overall?
Second, how can Trump seem to have so much momentum, and yet not be breaking away numerically?
Even leftist Trump haters are admitting – through clenched teeth – that his McDonald’s and garbage man stunts have been wildly effective. His appearance with Joe Rogan has gotten 40 million views and rave reviews. And his surrogates – JD, RFK Jr., Elon, Tulsi – have been hitting one home run after another for the last several weeks.
Conversely, the large voter group of the PWFEs (People With Functioning Eyes) have seen Kamala doing terribly in every interview and speech. Reliable leftist unions and newspapers that always endorse Dems have not endorsed her. And her surrogates have been as bad as Trump’s have been good.
Joe Biden and Bill Clinton are stomping on her every talking point. Walz is a skipping dipsh*t nightmare. Mark Cuban is insulting all of the female Trump voters, and Barack and Michelle are insulting all the male ones.
3. CO has been posting the betting odds, which my gut tells me are more reliable than most polling, since you know the people putting money on the line are at least honestly indicating what they expect to happen, as opposed to pollsters who are very often partisan and have skin in the game, either transparently or covertly. And those show a 61/39 expectation of a Trump win.
4. Even more important, to me, is to watch what the various campaigns do, as opposed to what they say. For example, when Kamala took ad money out of NC late last week to spend it elsewhere, that told me that her people believe that NC is a lost cause for them. (That doesn’t mean they’re right, but it’s at least an honest indicator of what they really think – a super rare thing from any Democrat campaign!)
In that vein, I think a couple of huge indicators have not been talked about enough: in the last several weeks, Democrat Senate candidates in four important states – Baldwin in WI, Casey in PA, Slotkin in MI and Sherrod Brown in OH – have put out their own ads distancing themselves from Biden/Harris and touting agreements with Trump.
In OH that makes sense, because it’s now a red state that Trump will win, but in WI, MI and PA? Those are supposed to be razor’s edge states, and yet high-profile Dem senators are going to knife their own party to snuggle up to Trump? And no other prominent Dems are trashing them over that?
That suggests that their own polling is showing that Harris will likely lose in their states, and they don’t want to be sucked down in her under-tow. (Yes, okay, insert your own Willie Brown joke here.)
Finally, there is good and bad news on the “Democrat cheating” front. The bad news is that they’re still trying to cheat as much as they did before, with documented dirty tricks (and at least limited success) in GA, PA and other battleground states. The good news is that the GOP has worked harder to counter that this time around, and has responded quickly and pushed back. But there’s still a lot to worry about on that front.
Having said all that, here are my best guesses:
President: If pollsters are still generally underestimating Trump’s vote by even half as much as they did in 2016 and 2020 (i.e. from 3-5 points nationwide, and averaging around 2-4 in the battlegrounds), his narrow leads and/or ties in the battlegrounds could easily turn into a sweep that gets him around 325-330 in the electoral college.
That’s my best-case scenario. Right now the RCP averages, with no toss-up states, gives him around 287, which is (please, please God!) my worst-case scenario. I’m just praying that he wins the electoral college by enough votes that Dem cheating or legal challenges in any one state won’t be able to reverse the result!
Senate: I don’t see how we don’t at least take the Senate with 51 seats, given that WV and Montana both seem to be nearly certain pickups. But if my sweep scenario above happens, Trump could have coat-tails that might pull narrow Senate underdogs in WI, MI, PA and OH across the finish line, for a total of 55 GOP Senate seats in my best-case scenario.
House: No idea. RCP averages show 42 seats as “in play,” with the GOP currently holding 201 to the Dems’ 192 seats. Their generic House preference is now 0.4% for the GOP, so if the GOP gets slightly more than half of those 42 seats, they’d have around 223ish seats to the Dems’ 212. My best-case scenario in the event of a GOP good night might add a half-dozen seats to the GOP total.
Okay, those are my guesses. (And, let’s be honest, my prayers!) Maybe you all could add your predictions to the comments?
If you haven’t already voted, please get out and vote on Tuesday! A Trump win is essential, but winning by a large margin – and maybe even winning the popular vote – would greatly strengthen his ability to get a lot done in the next two years.
Hamas – and Harris/Walz – delenda est!
Martin Simpson 
👍👍🇺🇸🌻 Trump !!
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