The Hunter Biden pardon, while aggravating, has not bothered me as much as it otherwise would have, for several reasons that many have commented on. First, it wasn’t exactly surprising to any of us who aren’t gullible partisan Democrats.
If all of CO Nation had been in a bar on Sunday night – and what a glorious event that would be! – and I got up on a table and said, “Hey, does everybody remember how Joe Biden has insisted for months that he has given his word as a Biden that he would never ever pardon Hunter no matter what, cross his heart and hope to die? Well he just issued a pardon for Hunter.”
The instantaneous roar from everyone in the crowd of, “UNEXPECTEDLY!” would have produced a sonic wave strong enough to knock me off my feet.
Second, a bright side of the Hunter pardon is that it represents one more devastating shot at the Democrats’ crumbling credibility. It not only makes Joey Gaffes look even worse on his way out the door (which I wouldn’t have thought possible, at this point), but it also re-humiliates all the elite Dems and talking heads who lied on his behalf, from “he’s sharp as a tack” to “his refusal to pardon his son shows how much Democrats revere the rule of law, unlike lawless Orange Hitler.”
More importantly, it gives Trump carte blanche to start tossing out pardons like Que Mala serving up steaming bowls of word goulash. Because any Dem stupid enough to start objecting vociferously is going to get Hunter thrown back in his face. (And nobody wants that. Ask any of the hookers to whom that has happened.)
And Trump needn’t come across as just getting even; he could draw substantive and useful distinctions between the way Biden and the Dems weaponized the legal system, and what he’s going to do.
The law was used against him to turn non-crimes into misdemeanors, and then turn those misdemeanors into felonies, and then those felonies into crimes against humanity. Democrats tried to jail him for keeping White House documents after he left office, but fought any attempts to even charge Hillary and Joe Biden for more severe instances of the same behavior.
Democrat Attorneys-General Eric Holder and Merrick Garland, and IRS official Lois Lerner were all found in contempt of Congress, and none of them suffered any consequences, while the Democrats jailed Peter Navarro and Steven Bannon for the same infraction. Etc. and etc.
I hope that on Day 1 Trump pardons every non-violent January 6th protestor (i.e. the vast majority of them), as well as any non-violent abortion protestors. More controversially, I’d like to see him pardon Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd.
That one might be too big of a distraction as he’s trying to get started, because it would inflame millions of low-information voters who have been lied to by the grifters in charge for the last 4 years. But that case has always been outrageous. It was a textbook example of a trial that required a change of venue, and in which evidence was tainted by corruption. (Starting with the Medical Examiner’s initial finding that Floyd’s death was caused by a combination of lethal levels of drugs in his system and the serious damage that had been done to his heart by his life-long drug use. Political pressure led him to later change his findings to mostly blame Chauvin.)
As I am writing this, the Daniel Penny verdict has not come down yet, but if the NY jury finds him guilty in the death of Jordan Neely, Trump should immediately pardon him, too. That one wouldn’t be as controversial as Chauvin, because even the majority of New Yorkers know what a travesty that trial has been.
In fact, pardoning Penny would be win-win for Trump, giving him both the chance to right an obvious wrong, and also achieve a political win by sending citizens AND criminals the message that law and order is back.
I can see him giving a press conference in NYC with Mayor Eric Adams (who is now talking tough on both crime and immigration) standing behind him. “I love NYC and New Yorkers too much to watch them suffer what’s coming their way if their insane, far-left politicians continue to inflict this kind of helplessness on them. In fact, anyone who intervenes as a Good Samaritan is going to get a pardon from me if convicted, so start fighting back, because my White House has got your back!”
Trump could hurt himself by obsessing over relitigating the 2020 election and his legal cases, as justified as that would be. But he could avoid that, and help his administration’s strong start by clearly looking forward, starting with clearing the decks of past victims of the Biden era corruption.
The second topic on my mind today is the state of political polling.
You may remember that back in September, I commented on the way Kamala’s team started having her do a lot of interviews after she had ducked them for many weeks. I said that I could only imagine one reason why: her campaign must have had internal polling showing that she was in much worse shape – and almost certainly losing – than all of the mountains of public polls that showed the election as tied, or with her having a slight lead.
Otherwise, an obviously vulnerable candidate who was almost certain to implode in even the softest of interviews would have kept hiding and tried to run out the clock.
But now her Senior Advisor David Plouffe (and others, off the record) has admitted that their internal polling never showed her in the lead, particularly in the battleground states. Sure, that proves me right, and justifies the many who have been calling me Nostra-marticus.
Okay, maybe not “many.” Because I just made that up. But I’m hoping it catches on, just the way that I hope “Nostra-dumb-ass” catches on to describe smug doofus Allan Lichtman and his “13 keys.”
But that’s not my main point.
How did her campaign have accurate polling info, when almost the entirety of the rest of the polling world did not? The public polls weren’t wildly off – the majority did show Trump with a slight, up to 2-point lead, and he ended up winning the popular vote nationwide by around 1.7, even though he swept the battleground states, mostly narrowly. But I’m wondering about the nature of her internal polls, and also whether the Trump campaign had the same info.
I completely understand “push polling,” i.e. inauthentic polls that play with word choice or demographic sampling in order to produce a favored result: our candidate is ahead, her positions are popular, and she’s got momentum and is winning, so get on the bandwagon.
But there are legitimate pollsters too, and their survival in the marketplace is tied to their ability to get it right as accurately and often as they can.
That’s why the infamous Ann Selzer Iowa poll – showing Kamala winning the state by 3 points, rather than losing by 13, as she eventually did – was such an odd outlier. She had previously earned a reputation as the “gold standard” among Iowa polls, and I was really confused by her final, wildly wrong poll.
Until it was revealed after the election that months earlier she had told the Des Moines Register that she was planning to retire after this election. Which leads to a plausible explanation of why a respected pollster would destroy her own future business prospects by putting out a wildly inaccurate poll that would logically help the Dems and hurt the GOP: she wasn’t planning to be in business in the future.
One thing this election points out: relying on a Real Clear Politics-style aggregation of all polls is a dicey proposition. Not because RCP isn’t a solid site which offers a great amount of detail for political junkies, but because the people running the site apparently don’t have an accurate way of gauging the honesty, competence or reliability of various polling outfits.
The rationale for a RealClearPolitics aggregation approach is the appeal to the “wisdom of crowds” idea: when you average data from all across the spectrum, you will get the best approximation of truth. But the “wisdom of crowds” assumes that the people in the crowd are doing their best to get the right answer, while many in the polling organizations are biased partisans, often looking – consciously or not – to confirm their own priors.
You can see that in the aggregation. Rasmussen, AtlasIntel and a handful of others showed Trump with a narrow but stubborn lead, and ended up very close to the final results. But the following polls all showed Harris winning, with similarly narrow but stubborn leads: Ipsos (Harris +2), NPR/PBS/Marist (+4), Forbes (+2), Yahoo (+1) and Morning Consult (+2).
Adding those consistently biased polls to your data pool necessarily means that the aggregation will be skewed.
Ironically – or not – the wisdom of crowds idea was completely vindicated by the betting markets – which consistently showed Trump winning by between a little and a lot. And that makes sense, because betting markets – while supposedly not scientific, or based on meticulously gathered and analyzed polling data – do recreate the ideal crowd envisioned by the “wisdom of crowds” idea.
They all have their own money on the line, and are thus incentivized purely by the desire to get it right, absent all other considerations of political bias or any rooting interests.
My conclusion is that we need polls to gauge the state of a race, but the polls that have been wrong in the past should pay a steep price.
If a car-maker’s vehicles kept blowing up, and a restaurant’s food kept making customers sick, and one of Hunter’s hookers kept giving him the clap – assuming he didn’t already have it. Which… c’mon – we would stop patronizing all of them.
And that about sums up the lefty pollsters’ recent performance: they keep blowing up, making us sick, and giving us STDs.
This year marks the third election in a row where most of the national polls significantly under-estimated Trump’s support across the board. In a fair world, those polls would be disregarded in the future until they’ve been right for as many cycles as they have now been wrong.
Which means that we should take NPR, Ipsos, Morning Consult and the rest seriously ONLY in 2040 at the earliest, and then only if they get ’28, ‘32 and ’36 correct!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 