A Gallup Survey Question Strongly Indicates a Donald Trump Win and Why Bernie Moreno Needs to Switch Gears to Beat Sherrod Brown
A Schumer-Harris future is dystopian; Brown being reelected may not be. Make the race about the former, Moreno will win; keep it aimed at the latter, only a miracle will stop Brown from reelection.
I love history. As George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As we approach the end of the 2024 presidential election, Gallup has provided us with an excellent bit of history. Since the 1948 presidential election, except in the 2000 presidential election, they have asked the question: “Which political party do you think can do a better job of handling the problem you think is most important — the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” As it turns out, the answer to that simple, straightforward question has accurately predicted the presidential winner in EVERY election except the 1948 election, with a "tie goes to the non-incumbent" in 1980. In 1948, Harry Truman shocked everyone by pulling out a slim win against Thomas Dewey in the “Dewey Beats Truman” news headline election. After the 1948 near miss and the 1980 "ties goes to the non-incumbent" elections, the Gallup question has nailed the winner in seventeen out of seventeen presidential elections. In those seventeen elections, the favored candidate on that question won.
So, where do things stand today on that question? Currently, the Republican Party is favored by 5% points, with the economy and immigration being raised as the top problems facing America. With less than six weeks remaining in the presidential election, it is possible that the numbers could reverse, BUT — and this is an ENORMOUS BUT — despite Kamala Harris's and her sycophants in the media’s best efforts, given that most voters know both the economy and immigration over the last four years took terrible turns for the worse, it is highly unlikely that respondents to Gallup’s question will suddenly blame the non-incumbent party for those issues (notwithstanding Oklahoma U.S. Senator James Lankford’s self-defeating efforts vis-a-vis his ill-conceived immigration bill). It was especially helpful to Donald Trump that Joe Biden made crystal clear on The View yesterday that Harris was his active right-hand woman over the last four years on every issue. Equally helpful to Trump was that BOTH Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, stated clearly in recent events that America cannot survive another four years of the policies that have ruined the economy and opened the floodgates for illegal immigration. Those policies are Harris’s policies and voters know it. Thus, she will not be able to pin the economic pain and devastation from illegal immigration experienced since 2020 on Trump.
Though it is possible that a plurality of voters will buck the seventy-six year trend identified by Gallup with its question, history suggest that possibility is incredibly small barring Democrat shenanigans and cheating.
As for the U.S. Senate race between Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown and Republican Bernie Moreno, I received a direct mail piece in the mail yesterday that perfectly captures the point I’ve been making on that race for months. If you miss my weekly interviews on The Bruce Hooley Show on 98.9FM The Answer, the point I’ve been making is that the Moreno campaign has been running the wrong campaign to defeat Brown. Specifically, I’ve suggested that the only way to beat Brown is to largely ignore him and nationalize the race to make it about stopping a U.S. Senate led by New York left-wing progressive Chuck Schumer along with a Democrat president. Brown has won his three previous elections by 6% points no matter who ran against him. The latest polls have him leading by 3.6% points. He wins regardless of his progressive stances because formerly Democrat union member and blue collar worker Trump Republicans in Northwest Ohio and the crescent that runs from Northeast Ohio down through Appalachia over to Cincinnati think Brown has always had their backs, so will ticket split by giving him their support while also voting for Trump. The only way to stop that from happening is by making the race about something OTHER THAN and BIGGER THAN Brown. That isn’t happening.
By and large, Moreno’s campaign and the PACs helping him have focused their television and direct mail campaign on Brown. Given Brown’s consistent lead, that campaign isn’t working. The recent direct mail piece I received from a group called “One Nation” is a great example of why it isn’t working. The piece centers on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on Ohio. It details how many Ohioans died, were hospitalized, and infected with the virus from Wuhan, China. It then pivots to the money wasted on projects having nothing to do with the pandemic that Brown supported via voting for COVID relief funds. Here are the problems with the direct mail piece:
(1) Most, if not all, of the Republican Ohio delegation ALSO voted like Brown did;
(2) Ohioans remember all too well the extremely idiotic and wasteful “Vax-A-Million” program created by Republican Governor Mike DeWind and Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, as well as the other wasteful items DeWine-Husted spent COVID money on. Thus, Brown is far from alone on throwing tax dollars around during and after the pandemic;
(3) Ohioans also know it wasn’t Brown who severely shutdown Ohio, its businesses, its schools, and the every day activities of Ohioans. DeWine and Husted did;
(4) Critically, while Biden and Harris botched the recovery launched by Trump, Trump was front and center (far too often) as president during the pandemic, so the worse case scenario is Ohioans will give Brown the same pass they are giving Trump; and
(5) Lastly, though a balanced budget amendment is popular among voters, it simply isn’t anywhere near the top of issues voters are concerned with right now, so raises an issue to hit Brown with that just isn’t effective.
If One Nation wanted to move the needle against Brown, it should have created a piece that raises the danger to Ohioans from a Schumer-led U.S. Senate with Harris in The White House framed around their stated intent to end the filibuster, which would only require 50% plus one vote in both congressional chambers to pass all legislation and open the left-wing floodgates on:
Packing the U.S. Supreme Court so it rubber-stamps all left-wing laws passed by simple majorities in Congress and rejects all Republican-led state challenges to the progressive wish list of federal laws;
Passing the Green New Deal that mandates electric vehicles and ends gas-powered cars and trucks, bans fracking and carbon-based energy, and sends energy prices through the stratosphere;
Making heavily Democratic Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia states thereby adding four more Democrat senators and at least six more Electoral Votes for Democrat presidential candidates;
Enacts significant gun control laws that ban scores of legal firearms and confiscates firearms currently owned by tens of millions of Americans;
Raising taxes on most productive Americans and their companies, which would create more economic pain requiring more federal spending and entitlements to make more Americans dependent on the federal government (i.e., Democrats) for survival, and
Giving amnesty to the ten million plus illegal immigrants they’ve let in over the last four years and keeping the border open so millions of illegal immigrants continue to flood across the border with the promise of amnesty, thereby making a massive number of new citizens with voting rights who will remain loyal to the Democratic Party and who are strategically located in battleground states, which secures the presidency for the Left for a generation.
Such an approach would be even more powerful now that an Alaskan man has been indicted for his plans to kill the six conservative Supreme Court Justices based on the threat Schumer made against those justices. The ticket splitting Trump Republican Ohioans would understand clearly that a vote for Brown is a vote for that very scary Schumer-Harris future. It would make their votes far more about stopping that future than about voting against Brown himself. Maybe that approach won’t work, but it would be more likely to work than the current approach that is trying to make those voters ignore all the things they think Brown did for them over the last twenty years in favor of a guy they barely know. A Schumer-Harris future is dystopian; Brown being reelected may not be. Make it about the former, Moreno will win; keep it aimed at the latter, only a miracle will stop Brown from reelection.
P.S. In follow-up to my note about the avalanche of political fundraising solicitations, the one below may be the most obnoxious. It tries to trick recipients into clicking on the link by (1) using a well known person’s name (Don Jr.) to increase responsiveness and (2) claims you’ve missed a question on a survey you previously filled out. My guess is senior citizens are particularly susceptible to these types of texts and emails. This repulsive practice needs to end.
