Many of us would agree with Donald Trump that “crooked Joe Biden” is “the worst president ever.” Further, unless the equally crooked corporate media or the Democratic National Committee’s election fixers can devise the necessary solutions, the Bad Orange Man may be re-elected president in November. According to recent polls, Trump is leading Biden in five out of six battleground states, and on immigration, the economy, and foreign policy, he is well ahead of his opponent.
Still, there is something troubling about how the public is answering certain polling questions, and for those of us who define ourselves not just as Republicans or Fox News junkies but as social conservatives, we should be paying attention to these signals.
The GOP has conceded, perhaps out of desperation, most LGBTQ+ issues to the Democrats. Republicans are now speaking out against only the most grotesque policies.
It appears that likely voters prefer Biden’s approach to the abortion question over Trump’s and do so by at least eight percentage points. Trump believes that Americans should have the right to vote on abortion laws in their separate states. He has also affirmed the legal correctness and binding nature of state referenda dealing with abortion, even those that do not reflect his own more restrictive position.
Biden and the Democrats, by contrast, support a bill to make abortion available to women without restriction up until a baby’s birth. No state under this proposed law would be allowed to limit the time period for fetus-termination. The Democratic position goes well beyond the time limits for legal abortions permitted even in most progressive European countries. But that is the position that most poll respondents evaluating the positions of the two presidential candidates seem to embrace. Let’s not imagine these voters don’t know where the candidates stand on this issue: Biden and Trump have both been explicit about their views on abortion rights.
Voters in my state prefer Biden’s view to Trump’s by a full 20 points. Abortion rights have now surged to second or third place as an electoral “dealbreaker,” and one feels drowned in stale feminist rhetoric every time suburban women tell us on TV about a return to back-alley abortions. Although Republican legislatures in some red states have tried to limit the time period for legal abortions, these initiatives are typically overturned in referenda. In blue states, abortion laws have tended to become more permissive since the Dobbs decision.
The GOP has conceded, perhaps out of desperation, most LGBTQ+ issues to the Democrats. Republicans are now speaking out against only the most grotesque policies being pushed by the administration, e.g., “gender-affirming” surgery for minors, allowing male athletes to compete in female sports events, and encouraging men claiming to be inwardly women to use female restrooms and lockers. Such weird government policies, strangely enough, have not even registered as leading political issues. Unless I’m mistaken, many Americans haven’t noticed or just don’t care about the Democrats’ attempted abolition of traditional gender distinctions or their war on the nuclear family. But support for unlimited abortion rights continues to rise as a key political issue.
Equally ominous, Biden beats Trump by nine points in polls about protecting democracy and fighting “political extremism.” If that polling information is true, then it should give us pause about the fall election. The Democrats will likely pull out, unless stopped, their predictable bag of tricks, such as ballot harvesting months before Election Day, trying to validate ballots that are submitted late and that are not filled out per instructions, and the removal of voter identification as a “racist” requirement. Any complaints from Trump’s team about fraud will receive short shrift from the media. After all, not Trump but Biden is the one protecting “our democracy.”
This poll response is not entirely unexpected. For the last four years, the corporate press has treated Trump as someone who makes totally false election claims. Trump allegedly tried to overthrow the government on January 6 in a mad effort to steal the 2020 election. It is not a question of whether these charges are correct but whether they’ve been effectively sold to the public. While the media present Democrats counterfactually as paragons of election integrity, Trump is depicted as someone trying to overthrow democracy by falsifying election results.
Of course, Trump has not done himself any favors by repeatedly claiming that he won the 2020 election by millions of votes. There is no way he can prove that assertion, and our former president is playing into his enemy’s hands by making it.
That the Democrats in all likelihood behaved dishonestly in the last presidential election is an assumption I won’t even contest.
But the answer to that situation should be obvious. The Republicans should be working relentlessly to end the Democrats’ dubious electoral practices. Republicans should be trying to return elections to a single day and having them take place in polling booths supervised by the two national parties. Naturally, the media will do everything it can to prevent that from happening. And its success in misrepresenting which presidential candidate is protecting democracy indicates that it can manipulate the public quite effectively on certain issues.