The bouncing political ball period of the 2024 cycle
of the national election campaign is now over, and
the concluding period of grueling hand-to-hand
combat for voters has begun.
Both presidential campaigns had polling bounces
preceding, during, and just after their conventions.
provoked by traumatic events, including a serious
assassination attempt, and the sudden withdrawal
of a presumptive presidential nominee.
So much about this presidential election cycle has
been unprecedented, and even now continues to
go in uncharted political territory, that most
attempts to confidently predict outcomes are just
guesses in the dark.
For some time, public polling of voters has become
less and less accurate, especially in the extended
period before the final campaign season from
September to November. Just as systematic bias
has overtaken the establishment media, a similar
bias has seemingly corrupted public polling. Almost
all the raw data of voter polls is adjusted by the
pollsters subjectively to fit their personal expectations
of who will actually vote, so it is quite easy to distort,
either intentionally or unintentionally any poll result.
This includes guessing party and gender turnout.
There is also considerable evidence that the party
affiliations of many voter base groups is changing,
even as we have seen the Democratic Party go
from being a mulri-ethnic working class party to
becoming a party of affluent, highly educated
progressive voters, and the Republican Party go
from being a party of well-to-do elites to becoming
a party of blue collar voters with traditionalist values.
The Democrats’ base of black, Hispanic and Jewish
voters is eroding, and Republicans have been losing
suburban women, business executives and many
college educated voters in their base.
Only former President Donald Trump is already
well-known to voters. Kamala Harris, J.D, Vance and
Tim Walz are largely unknown. This makes TV debates
and political advertising more significant than usual as
the contestants try to define and characterize opponents
to their advantage.
In spite of being well-known to voters, Mr. Trump,
following the attempt on his life, has the opportunity to
enhance his public image as he has done in his
behavior after being shot, his demeanor at the GOP
convention, his new-found self discipline in the
debate he had with Mr. Biden and with his hands-off
attitude to his party’s nominees for the U.S. Senate this
cycle. His recent action, to repair his long-standing
feud with the Republican governor of Georgia, is his
latest effort to improve his image with voters who
share his politics but have been turned off by his verbal
political style.
In the end. however, all of the strategies to employ
rhetoric, image and personal attack in this cycle, will
almost certainly be outweighed by how the key group
of undecided, independent and wavering voters of
both parties feel about their economic well-being and
their personal security in both their own communities
and in a world of military and economic threats which
only seem to increase.
Realizing that many public polls are inaccurate or
corrupted, that most media is biased, and that much
of what is reported as fact is not true or only partly
true, voters face serious obstacles in deciding who
to vote for in 2024, The good news is that the U.S.
voter much more often than not, has done what’s best
for the country in election cycles past. With so much
at stake, we can only hope they will do so again on
Election Day, 2024.
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Copyright (c) 2024 by Barry Casselman. All rights reserved.
