I’m with ​​​​​​​Kudzu, I mean Kudlow.

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No, I’m not talking about being with Larry Kudlow on the economy. Larry Kudlow has about as firm of an understanding about the US economy as I do about our checking account, which is why Teri handles the money fer Gods sake!

Like Joe Biden, Larry Kudlow is finding out that when you have l a long career at something, you do and say shit that other people can’t wait to throw back in your face later, long after it goes kerflooey! And Kudlow found that out repeatedly over the weekend, as talk show hosts threw his myriad of failed past predictions in his face. But amidst all of that, Kudlow had a mantra that he kept repeating the way a 4 year old keeps chanting “There’s nothing in the closet, there’s nothing in the closet” in bed at night. And that mantra was Don’t be afraid of optimism!

Thank you Larry! I’ve been desperately trying to preach that exact same sermon for well over a freakin’ year now! After the sorry events of November 8th, 2016, we all went through the various stages of grief. But somewhere along the line, the Democrats let fatality and resignation creep in. A year ago, I was citing polls, and national mood, and all kinds of shit, foreseeing a blue wave of at least 30 seats, and all I got in my comments was “Don’t be so optimistic, there’s plenty of time for us to fuck this up. Besides, the polls don’t mean anything, 2016 taught us that!” Good Lord! Even Charlie freakin’ Brown still tries to kick the stupid football!

And it just happened again yesterday on MSNBC. Karine Jean Pierre, who apparently no longer has any serious responsibilities at Moveon.org, since she now spends all of her time as a potted plant on various MSNBC sets, replied to a question about Democratic primary polls by responding, “It’s early yet, the polls don’t mean anything. Besides, we learned in 2016 that the polls don’t mean anything.” Oh, for fucks sake! How many times do we gotta do this damn scene, Roger?

Look, for the last time: in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%, 58.2-46.1. And if you look at almost any of the stable, reputable, mainstream national polls in the last week before of the election, almost all of them had Clinton winning by 2-2.5%! They couldn’t have nailed it any better if they tried. Trump won in the electoral college, and the national polls don’t predict that!

Look, I’m down with bashing the polls after 2016, hell, ya gotta blame somebody, right? But after the polls spent months in 2018 predicting a blue wave, and Larry Sabato nailed it almost down to the district, and we actually outperformed the polls in the election itself I kind of hoped that the polls could get some of their swagger back. But no, the Democrats are all still lying there under the covers, trembling at the though of the big, bad poll boogeyman!

Did you ever love playing a game when you were a kid? I dunno, say scrabble? And while you loved playing the game, you couldn’t win at it to save your mothers immortal soul? You’d be up by like 90 points, and you’d start playing it safe, second guessing yourself because if you did something stupid, your friend would come up with something like equalize on a triple word score and kick your ass. So, what happened, every time? You’d come up some lame ass word like real, which your opponent would use to form equalize on a triple word score, and kick your ass. That’s how the Democrats are right now.

Am I saying that we should all just grab a beer, hit the button on the Barcalounger, and wait for November to get here? Of course not! But just remember one thing. Fear immobilizes, and optimism energizes. Fortunately, in 2018 we had an army pf activists and candidates that just believed, and they made those rosy polls hold up. And in 2020, we have that same army, and another army of presidential candidates that believe, and who believe that they can make the polls prove out again. And maybe if we start to believe the polls, and draw energy from them, maybe they will start to believe them too, and crawl under the covers. I can live with that.

Know this. Whether it’s by the economy, or fear, or hatred, or bigotry, Trump is going to beat the bushes to try to get every last one of his brain dead Trombies out to the polls. How do we do that if we spend all of our time sitting around and worrying about numbers? Do the words those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it mean anything to y’all? 2016 was then. 2020 is now. Get the fuck over it Karine!

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1 COMMENT

    • LOL Just exercising my editorial prerogative…I seldom get up on my soapbox, but this whole “Every election forever will be 2016 all over again” Groundhogs Day shit has been driving me up the wall!!! lol

      • IS more than a little annoying, yes, Murf. Americans only typically see a repeat of the last great catastrophe as the most likely scenario for future trouble. It’s stupid on two levels: 1) much like lightning, the same disaster rarely strikes twice in the exact same way and 2) it makes you ignore the REAL threats incoming. And no one has yet to credibly explain to me how Trump has expanded or even held onto his 2016 support nor how Putin may have more important problems in his own backyard to bother with a US election.

        • Bareshark, the simple fact of the matter is that he HASN’T done either of those things!!! Catch my “Nath doesn’t lie” article from yesterday…In it I show that since election day, his support has dropped from 46-42% nationally, and that drop mirrors almost precisely the difference in popular vote loss in 2016, and the GOP popularity vote loss of 2018 nationwide…He has in fact shrunk his popularity to pretty much nothing more than his core hard support…If he can’t dtop his eventual Democratic challenger below 43%m he can’t win…

          • Oh…Me tawwwwwy… lol This has just been spooling me up for a while ow, and yesterday was the last straw…

  1. Did you think she meant general election polls? When I watched that segment, I thought she was referring to primary polls the summer before. But maybe not.

    She IS on there a lot. I think msnbc tries hard to balance the center and far left on their panels…which mostly just makes everyone gripe, lol.

    • rory, you MAY be right, but in my own mind, I’m 100% certain…First, if she were talking about the primaries, she would have been talking about 2015, not 2016..Second, there was no great mystery in the polling in the 2016 primaries, Clinton led pole to pole…And third, And third, this “the polls mean jack shit since 2016” mantra is like her fuzzy slippers and teddy bear…Every time that she doesn’t like something in a poll, her knee jerk response is “2016 taught us that polls don’t mean jack shit!”…,

  2. “Look, for the last time: in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%, 58.2-46.1. And if you look at almost any of the stable, reputable, mainstream national polls in the last week before of the election, almost all of them had Clinton winning by 2-2.5%! They couldn’t have nailed it any better if they tried. Trump won in the electoral college, and the national polls don’t predict that!”

    First off, I think you meant that Hillary won the popular vote with 48.2-46.1 (58.2-46.1 is a heck of a bigger difference than just 2.1%).
    Secondly, the national polls do need to “predict” the Electoral College and, in many cases, will IF they release poll data on a state-by-state basis rather than a national basis. It does NO good to win by 2.1% if 60% of that 2.1% comes from just one state (Hillary beat Trump by 4.3 million actual votes in just California with its 55 EVs while her national margin was under 2.9 million; her percentage margin of victory in California was a whopping 30.1%).
    Thirdly, the polls can’t always rely on the voters they poll–the so-called Bradley effect. In 1992, California polls indicated that LA mayor Tom Bradley was well ahead and likely to win the governor’s race that year only to face a “surprise” upset by GOP candidate Deukmejian; one reason that was considered for Bradley’s “loss” was that interviewees didn’t feel “comfortable” in saying they’d vote “for” the white guy (Deukmejian) or “against” the black guy (Bradley). (A similar event happened in the 1992 Colorado Amendment 2 issue which would overturn local gay rights ordinances. A slight majority of people who were polled indicated they opposed the Amendment, yet, when the votes were tallied, Coloradans showed they were fine with the idea of opposing gay rights. Again, researchers suggested that respondents were more likely to give the “right” answer to the poll questions while, in the privacy of the voting booth, they could indulge their prejudices.) Following the Trump “victory,” researchers suggested there were a lot of “shy” or “closet” Trump supporters who either said they’d vote for Clinton or had “no opinion” at the time of the poll and, of course, such respondents throw polls all to hell.

  3. I agree!!! Fear is why Pelosi is standibg in the way of bonafide impeachment proceedings. Trump should have been gone, you know, like yestrday. But fakequeen Nancy and the Dems are ruled by fear of trump, fear of whatever. So the traitor is still in the WH. People like Warren because she is optimistic. Biden less so.

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