New Hampshire Takeaways the Mainstream Media Missed - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
New Hampshire Takeaways the Mainstream Media Missed
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Joe Biden speaks at a town hall in Hampton, New Hampshire, February 9, 2020 (Andrew Cline/Shutterstock.com)

Now that the New Hampshire results are in — and, oh boy, wait for the Nevada vote count! — there are several takeaways that do not necessarily accord with the mainstream media’s “common wisdom.”

  1. Polls Do Not Matter Until the Last Few Weeks of an Election.

New Hampshire proves something about polling that I have been writing for years: polls do not matter until elections are within four or fewer weeks. The average person has no idea what in the world is going on. Think of your friends and coworkers. If you have astute friends and work among intelligent people, then just think of the kids whom your kids date — and their parents. They do not know who their governor is or their U.S. senators, what “Medicare for All” even means, what the “Green New Deal” really means, what they pay in taxes, whom we fought in the Revolutionary War, World War I, or World War II. Heck, they do not even know whom we fought during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Most people are clueless; they just do not realize how little they know — because, duh, they are clueless. Thus, the vast majority of college kids and even grad students outside Young Americans for Freedom, the Federalist Society, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA almost universally think Ocasio-Cortez (“the Hyphen”) has all the answers, and that is because they do not even know the questions.

You know this from asking people for car directions: clueless people hate to admit it. That is why G-d created GPS. Because most people are utterly ignorant but are ashamed to confess their ignorance to pollsters, polls are relatively meaningless until four or fewer weeks before elections because people start to pay attention to the candidates and issues only as elections draw near, if even then. Until that time draws near, people simply mutter what they think their friends, customers, clients, patients, and relatives think. As a result, polls showed that Joe Biden was the runaway winner in the New Hampshire primaries with 30 percent and more of the vote tallies — but only in the polls of months ago. As the voting day drew near, people started paying attention to Biden. Initially, it was, “I love this guy. He was vice president of the United States for eight years. He was a United States senator for decades. He was Obama’s point man on foreign policy. No one else in America has as much foreign-policy experience as Joe Biden. And he is such a nice guy. Uncle Joe. Rides the trains. Grew up in the coal mines or wherever Neil Kinnock did.”

As elections drew closer, people started paying actual attention to Uncle Joe. It turned out that, regardless of whether or not he knows foreign policy, he often does not know what state he is in — both geographically and mentally. And as for foreign policy, maybe he is a crook who leveraged all that “experience” and the authority Obama delegated to him in dealing with Ukraine so that he surreptitiously could squeeze millions of rubles, hryvnias and kopiyoks, and dollars out of them for his family and, by obvious extension, to fill his own pockets. It turned out that he is more corrupt than the “common wisdom” realized.

And also more nasty. Instead of sweet, smilin’, jokin’ Uncle Joe, voters started to learn that he insults even innocent elderly people who ask him simple questions. “Tell ya what, buddy — go vote for someone else.” “You’re a damn liar, man!” To an innocent college kid: “You’re a lying, dog-faced pony soldier.” It turns out he is nasty, bewildered, not the common man who grew up in coal mines or whatever, but a corrupt swindler who manipulated the trust inherent in his office to squeeze millions of dollars into his family through quid pro quos. And he is even more of a nut than some realized, as when he sucked his wife’s finger in public and discussed children rubbing the hair on his legs.

In the end, the polls of months ago that showed Biden the runaway winner, scoring 30 percent and more, were forgotten by election day. Mired in fifth place, he did not even break double digits. The only thing the polls got right was that Joe Biden indeed proved to be the runaway candidate in New Hampshire. Before voting even ended, he was the candidate who ran away — from New Hampshire to South Carolina.

  1. If Polls Do Not Matter Until the Last Few Weeks, It Means Nothing That Polls Now Show Dems Now Beating Trump.

Once one grasps the irrelevance of premature polls, it no longer matters broadly when some or all Democrats now poll ahead of President Trump. President Trump has not yet had the opportunity to have the greater public hear his entire story. Most people do not watch the State of the Union (SOTU) address, do not know it just was delivered, and do not even know what it is. They think, “Of course I know the state of the union. I live in Iowa or Montana or New York, a state in the union.” And that assumes that they even know that “Union” in a SOTU context has nothing to do with labor organizing. The president is the victim of 24/7/366 (leap year) slander and libel by the Corrupt Journalist Corps. Every good thing he does or achieves is perverted to seem bad. Every piece of bad news is highlighted, and all the fabulous news that jammed 90 minutes of a SOTU address does not get half a minute in the media.

It is much too expensive for anyone other than Michael Bloomberg to buy advertising all 24 hours of the day every day of the 366-day year to tell the other side. So Republican campaigns hold back their fire and blitz the airwaves and social media especially during the final month before elections. That is when they finally get to tell their story, once every four years. Obviously, no campaign wants to fall 25 points behind in polling, even months before an election. But the likes of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar were irrelevant months ago. Likewise, months ago the media practically crowned the briefly ascendant Elizabeth Warren the presumptive Democrat nominee. Thus, months from now, once the Trump campaign gets rolling, his numbers will jump while the other side’s concurrently drop.

Moreover, now there is no clear opponent to Trump. Many who now tell pollsters lackadaisically that they will vote against Trump are speaking abstractly because they do not know who will be opposing him. If it becomes a showdown against Bernie or Pocahontas, many Democrats who recoil from them, from their socialism and even Marxism, and from their particular nuances (Bernie’s age and heart attack; Pocahontas’s unbearably screechy, whiny, thin, cracking voice) will prove to be Trump voters, albeit reluctantly so. On the other hand, if the candidate is Bloomberg, the Democrat Left will stay home, while many others will prefer Trump’s populism to Bloomberg’s Romney-style elitism. If Buttigieg emerges, the public finally will learn about what he did to South Bend. Consider what happened as the public began to learn about Robert O’Rourke after Vanity Fair magazine front-covered him; he sank faster than the Titanic, only torpedoed by ear hairs and dental flossing instead of by an iceberg. This all is how it transpired in 2016, when early polls predicted that Trump had no chance against Hillary, and thus will it unfold again.

  1. The Pelosi Stillborn Impeachment Helped Kill Biden.

One of the main purposes of the Pelosi Stillborn Impeachment ostensibly was to help Biden by severely weakening Trump while sidelining senators opposing Biden by forcing them off the campaign trail and locking them in the Senate. Thus, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar were stuck in D.C. when they needed to be eating barbecue and corn dogs at Iowa and New Hampshire state fairs.

Yet the opposite transpired. The impeachment bolstered President Trump’s popularity and ratings enormously. And the impeachment hoax kept the story of the Bidens and Ukraine in the news for months, despite media efforts to bury it, all on the eve of the first caucuses and primaries. Everywhere Joe Biden campaigned, he was asked about Hunter and Burisma, and those questions typically generated the horribly nasty and hurtful responses with which he hit back. Interesting how things work out. There is an old Yiddish proverb: Man proposes, and G-d disposes.

  1. Biden and Warren Are Finished (But Don’t Tell Them or Their Donors).

Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick had to drop out immediately after New Hampshire. Many Americans do not realize that southern New Hampshire is practically a suburb of Massachusetts, just as northern New Jersey is practically a suburb of New York (e.g., the New York Giants football team plays in East Rutherford, New Jersey), southern Jersey is practically a suburb of Philadelphia, and southern Indiana is practically a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky. Many New Hampshire voters watch Massachusetts television stations all the time, so are extremely well acquainted with Patrick and the Massachusetts senators. That gives a huge advantage in New Hampshire to any candidate from Massachusetts. With Patrick scoring pathetically, less than one-half of 1 percent, he dropped out faster than a guy on a bungee cord, and he is not bouncing back.

Less obvious, though, is that Elizabeth Warren also did pitifully, in light of expectations — and, even more so, in light of the geographical proximity. She was the huge national media darling among the Corrupt Journalist Corps only a few weeks ago, with endless stories on how she would stand for hours after a speech, allowing each and every person at her rallies to take a “selfie” with her. The media dubbed her as brilliant, charismatic, folksy. After all, she even drinks beer in her kitchen: The Brewski in the Tepee.

The hype never made sense. Warren is not charismatic. By dint of nature, of genes that are not her fault, her voice is shrill, whiny, screechy, thin, and weak. It is what it is. That works in whiny, screechy Massachusetts, where liberals all commonly whine and complain about all their victimization. Whining may enthrall the victimhood crowd, but it just does not play for the presidency. Sure, a whiny, screechy voice works particularly well on selfies for the same reason that East European immigrants went into the movie industry a century ago: the pictures were silent. You could not hear voices in the early silent motion pictures, so actors could seem sexier than they would to the average moviegoer if they sounded like the East European immigrants they were. But if anyone ever would put a Warren selfie to sound: fuggediboudit.

The fact that she could not break double digits in New Hampshire, in her own backyard, means that she now is finished. Since she presumably will not read this article nor see the smoke signals throughout New England, it will take a bit longer for her and her donors to figure it out on their own. Which is fine. Let them sink their millions into her campaign without any reservations, even as she shamelessly boasts of taking three dollars from a dirt-broke college fool who tells Warren that she is hopelessly mired in student loan debt with only $6 left to her name and wants Pocahontas to have half of it.

  1. Communist Bernie Is Celebrating, But Probably Prematurely.

Bernie the Communist was on a victory parade the minute the New Hampshire results came in. Perhaps he indeed will emerge with the Democrat nomination, but not as probably as he now exults. Bernie’s Vermont is next door to New Hampshire. He won New Hampshire four years ago against Hillary by a mega-landslide of more than 20 points, 60-38. But, interestingly, this time — not. The 2020 results show that he only inched by Buttigieg, a do-nothing mayor of an Indiana college town that has not been governed well, and Bernie did not much trounce Klobuchar either, beating her only by some five points. As the field narrows in the weeks ahead, Pocahontas will return to the reservation and her Marxist–socialist vote will go mostly to Bernie, but that boost would bring his percentages only into the mid-30s. Likewise, as Biden disappears, his vote will go mostly to a blend of Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg. Eventually, that vote probably will exceed the Marxist–socialist vote.

It is noteworthy that Bernie did not trounce the opposition in New Hampshire this time. Yes, he had a broader field opposing him, but he was campaigning in his own backyard, where he enjoys not only a profound geographical advantage but also the advantage of having campaigned there four years before and having learned the lay of the land. He now moves to Nevada, where the huge hotel-union labor vote has to decide whether their preference is the Marxist credo of “workers of the world unite” behind Bernie, which also would mean giving up the fabulous health-care plans that their unions have wrested from the casinos after years of their workers’ strikes for that enhanced coverage. Would Las Vegas laborers give up excellent health care for a Bernie Medicare-for-All nightmare? Don’t bet the house on it. Or the presidency.

Dov Fischer
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Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (comprising over 2,000 Orthodox rabbis), was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly 20 years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before practicing complex civil litigation for a decade at three of America’s most prominent law firms: Jones Day, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. He likewise has held leadership roles in several national Jewish organizations, including Zionist Organization of America, Rabbinical Council of America, and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Federalist, National Review, the Jerusalem Post, and Israel Hayom. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com.
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