Dear Survivor,
Stocks are tumbling, coronavirus cases are surging, rioters are in the streets, the Biden family business is under attack, and President Trump keeps rallying because the momentum is all his. Trump is WINNING. What a finish.
All bets that were laid all summer long are now in question as the press is no longer licking its mask-covered chops. It’s no longer practically guaranteeing a Biden win. Because, to be sure, if Biden won, all masks were off. The “Big Guy” would usher in an end to the virus. It was never about the sick being crazily rushed to nursing homes. It was all a mirage. It was always about making it the “Trump virus.”
If Trump wins, the winter coronavirus will be like nothing we’ve ever seen. Blue state governors, mayors, and teachers union bosses will lock it all down, destroying economies again, simply to punish voters like sixth-graders in detention. But this cannot last.
Americans are waking up to the fact they’ve been lied to by the Clintons/Obamas/Bidens promising a better life while enriching their own. Americans know President Trump’s economy made them better off—and made their families better. The Trump “V” recovery is happening. It’s a thing, it’s real, much to the dismay of the press.
You and I know there’s never been a more crucial time to think about where you live. You and I know the press will fight a Trump second term tooth and nail. You and I know about the potential violence at the polls. You and I see the looting and riots every night that the press calls “peaceful protests.” You and I know they will turn a Trump win into a Civil War. Because the stock market’s predicting a Trump win. Big time.
“Ah, Tony (Bobulinski), You’re Just Going to Bury All of Us Man”
The Tony Bobulinski interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight was absolutely about Joe Biden, but it was also about the future political hopes and dreams of the Obama family. Can you guess why former Pres. Obama is beating the pavement?
Obama is hitting the dais, not for Joe, but for Michelle and, to a larger extent, his money-making legacy on Netflix. How much did Obama know? Why the sudden interest in Biden?
There’s interest because last night Bobulinski simply revealed what he learned as the one on the receiving end of the emails and texts from Hunter Biden, and we learned what Joe knew. Bobulinski is simply saying hey “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m the one receiving all of them. I didn’t send them.”
The damage? Plenty. Americans are tired of the Clinton Foundation, the Obama Vineyard estate, the Netflix specials, and of the Biden family enriching themselves not so much on their reputations but on that of America’s. Enough is enough. Americans prefer their presidents come to the White House already as rich as Croesus—looking to help fellow Americans, not themselves.
Brother Jim Biden said they get away with it all because of “plausible deniability.” But you can deny until you’re blue in the (masked) face. Americans know when they’re being lied to—they Schiff it out—they know the truth in their gut.
Rep. Adam Schiff told Americans that the revelations about Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings were all a “Russian disinformation” campaign. That’s when Bobulinski decided to go public. He demanded a retraction from Schiff and told Biden family fixer, Rob Walker, that without one, he’d make everything public.
Carlson played an audio recording of Walker pleading with Bobulinski to stay quiet.
“If he [Schiff] doesn’t come out, on record, I am providing the facts,” Bobulinski said.
“Ah, Tony, you’re just going to bury all of us, man,” Walker responded.
The Bidens and Obamas are underestimating Americans. It cannot last forever. You can feel Joe’s tension as ALL the momentum is about Trump. Keep the parades coming because Trump is rolling.
Trump’s Momentum and the Liars Protecting Hunter Biden
It’s all about momentum for President Trump as he covers the country in Air Force One with one rally after another, while former VP Joe Biden is trying to remember where he stands on fracking. I’m sure he’s mumbling another F-word under his mask.
You can’t play defense and win the presidency. Hope is not a strategy. As Trump is showing us, you need to make your case directly to the people.
And the people are watching. Take the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation, for example. You could see the emotion on Amy Coney Barrett’s face as she was being sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas in the Rose Garden. It was an incredible moment. It was powerful.
Then, you woke up to learn two Philadelphia police officers shot a man who had attacked them with a knife. He died, sparking a riot that injured 30 police officers. All this happened after another bloody weekend in Chicago where their fat boy governor imposed another business-killing shutdown, not because of the violence but for an uptick in coronavirus cases. What a joke.
In her acceptance speech, Barrett declared how proud she is our democratic republic, as created by the Constitution. When she won the vote in the Senate, the other cable channels did not even report it, as pointed out live by Tucker Carlson on his show. How long will Americans be OK being lied to by those in power? It’s a fact that Hunter Biden was on the take, and we’ll learn more about the “Big Guy’s” role as this unfolds.
Your Survival Guy’s Saturday Lunch Surprise You Won’t Believe
Your Survival Guy is on the ground on the rough and tumble streets of Newport, RI, for you—risking it all. Take last Saturday, for example. Enjoying an after-lunch stroll, I was taken aback, drawn like a dog to a whistle by honking cars and loud music on America’s Cup Ave. “What’s this commotion?” Your Survival Guy asked. Self responded, “This my friend is a Trump car parade in Newport, RI.”
Indeed it was.
Just an hour earlier, Your Survival Guy was lunching at the Clarke Cooke House, enjoying an afternoon with Becky and a life long friend visiting us from Naples, FL. Your Survival Guy’s seaside MRE was a half-dozen oysters and mignonette; tuna ceviche passionfruit leche de tigre, avocado, Bermuda onion, jalapeño, and cilantro; and a crab and clam chowder; all washed down with a crisp, chilled pinot gris (or two).
Fast forward to our perch above America’s Cup from the beautiful new Hammett’s Hotel when, to our surprise, a sea of Trump cars, trucks and flags unfurled before our very eyes. It was magnificent—a site to be seen in, of all places, Newport, RI.
You couldn’t help but be excited. We witnessed college-age kids toasting their Bud Lights, giving a thumbs up and a dad with a stroller doing the same and perhaps wishing he had something to toast. It reminded me of our Trump boat parade this summer that turned Rhode Island red on that memorable Sunday morning. Things are heating up for Trump. Let’s go!
Newport, RI Trump Parade. Notice the Three Lonely Biden Supporters Across the Street.
Final Debate Review: Your Daughter’s Struggle is NOT Amusing
The final OUTSTANDING debate performance by President Donald J. Trump spoke to suburban moms nervous that their daughters and their daughter’s-daughters might end up living in a van down by the river. “The Big Man,” Basement Biden, looked like a short-circuiting animatronic at Disney’s Hall of Presidents.
Moms across America are worried. President Trump understands this. He understands kids need to be in school, and he understands America needs to be open for business.
Basement Joe waves a mask in surrender to teachers unions that close schools—like this week in Boston—looking like he’s sucking on a lemon reacting to the truth that maybe union bosses don’t have the kids’ best interests in mind.
Moms working from home are at their breaking point. They cannot continue like this. They cannot satisfy business customers on ZOOM when their most important ones are zooming their lives away in the next room like zombies.
You cannot do two jobs at once. When the Trump economy was roaring, you got your work done, your kids had school, and at five, you were a family. Today you don’t know what the four of you are other than tired, frustrated, and angry at each other.
As her mom, you see your daughter trying to do it all. You try to help her, but you get in the way. With all the chaos, there is no time for you. Every minute of every day is just STRESS.
You see “The Big Guy,” and you know in your heart he has no clue about YOUR FAMILY’s struggles. Why am I falling in line like a mask-wearing lemming when no one understands how my family is malfunctioning?
What President Trump accomplished last night was to show he’s listening to you. You know this because of the way he acted. He knows the stakes are too high. He has no problem making an adjustment to his demeanor to help America.
At the debate, President Trump gave you a reason to get out and vote, especially if you’re tired of feeling like you’re living in an amusement park. You just want your family back.
This Poll Predicts a Trump Win, Do You Know Why?
National Review’s Rich Lowry’s explains how pollster Trafalgar Group called Trump’s win in 2016 and is predicting a repeat in a couple of weeks by capturing how Americans feel in their hearts. As Trafalgar Group’s CEO, Robert Cahaly explains, not every family has a half-hour to answer questions.
What Cahaly did was find a way to capture the mood of the busy family with a shorter list of questions and to remove the stigma of being judged by their responses—he found respondents don’t tell you what’s in their hearts.
That’s why polling is so hard. Feelings aren’t easy to capture in a poll. That’s why a polling approach like Trafalgar’s, that focuses more on the hearts of the modern American family, is so intriguing.
Lowry writes:
The upstart Trafalgar Group doesn’t see 2020 the same way everyone else does.
The polling aggregator on the website RealClearPolitics shows the margin in polls led by Joe Biden in a blue font and the ones led by Donald Trump in red. For a while, the battleground states have tended to be uniformly blue, except for polls conducted by the Trafalgar Group.
If you are a firm believer only in polling averages, this isn’t particularly meaningful, but if you are familiar with Trafalgar’s successes in 2016, when (unlike other pollsters) it had Trump leading in Michigan and Pennsylvania and, in 2018, Ron DeSantis winning his gubernatorial race, it is notable. Regardless, it’s worth knowing why one pollster is departing from nearly everyone else.
To this end, I checked in with Robert Cahaly, who is predicting a Trump victory, on the latest edition of The Editors podcast. This piece is based on our conversation.
Cahaly was born in Georgia and got involved in politics going door-to-door as a kid. He started a political-consulting firm with some others in the late 1990s. Around 2008, he says, they realized that the polling they were getting wasn’t very good, so they started doing their own. He says they got good, accurate results in the races they were working.
In the 2016 primaries, they started putting out some of their own polls. “Our polls ended up being the best ones in South Carolina and Georgia,” Cahaly says. “So we started studying what it was that made those so different.”
Then there was the breakthrough in the 2016 general election. “We ended up having an incredible year,” he says. “I mean, we got Pennsylvania right. We got Michigan right. We had the best poll in five of the battleground states in 2016. And I actually predicted 306 to 232 on the electoral college. And we went from doing a little bit of polling on the side to that [being] our primary business in about 24 hours. And since then, that’s what we’ve been doing.”
Much of Trafalgar’s approach focuses on accounting for the so-called social-desirability bias. As Cahaly puts it, that’s when a respondent gives you “an answer that is designed to make the person asking the question be less judgmental of the person who answers it.” Cahaly notes that this phenomenon showed up as long ago as the 1980s, in the so-called Bradley effect, when the African-American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, underperformed his polling in a gubernatorial race. It has been a hallmark of the Trump era and is one reason other pollsters missed the impending victory of Ron DeSantis over Andrew Gillum in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial race.
“I’ve got to get past what you want to say in public and get to what you really feel,” Cahaly says. “Because what’s in your heart is going to be what’s on that ballot.”
There are a number of methodological differences in how Trafalgar goes about its work.
One is the number of questions on its surveys. “I don’t believe in long questionnaires,” Cahaly says. “I think when you’re calling up Mom or Dad on a school night, and they’re trying to get the kids dinner and get them to bed, and that phone rings at seven o’clock — and they’re supposed to stop what they’re doing and take a 25- to 30-question poll? No way.”
Why does that matter? “You end up disproportionately representing the people who will like to talk about politics, which is going to skew toward the very, very conservative and the very, very liberal and the very, very bored, “Cahaly explains. “And the kind of people that win elections are the people in the middle. So I think they miss people in the middle when they do things that way.”
According to Cahaly, most polls are more than 25 questions. He keeps it between seven and nine, so respondents can answer in a matter of minutes.
Then there is how the questions are asked. “We do not like to do all live calls,” Cahaly says.
This goes back to the social-desirability bias. People with opinions that are unpopular “don’t want to be judged by somebody on the phone that they don’t know.” If this was always true, it’s particularly so now: “They’ve seen all this stuff of people being shamed for their opinion, people losing their jobs.”
So Trafalgar mixes up how it contacts people, and especially wants respondents to feel safe in responding. “We use collection methods of live calls, auto calls, texts, emails, and a couple that we call our proprietary digital technology that we don’t explain, but it’s also digital,” Cahaly says. The point, he continues, is to “really push the anonymous part — this is your anonymous say-so.”
Another factor, is that “conservatives are less likely to participate in polls in general,” he says. “We see a five-to-one refusal rate among conservatives.” That means “you’ve got to work very hard to get a fair representation of conservatives, when you do any kind of a survey.”
Trafalgar also goes about building its list differently. One thing the firm noticed in its polling in the Georgia and South Carolina primary in 2016, Cahaly says, is “people voting who didn’t know how to use the touch machines, people showing up who hadn’t voted in 15 years.”
It went out of its way to build a list including these kinds of low-propensity voters, “knowing,” per Cahaly, “that the other pollsters probably weren’t even reaching out to these people.” The firm has “a fingerprint” of characteristics meant to find these hard-to-identify voters.
Presidential Debate #2: What if It Wasn’t Cancelled?
Who’s having more fun this week than President Trump? You watch him at his rallies, and connect with his supporters, and you can’t help but smile. Then, you watch former VP Biden in front of his handlers, and you wonder if he knows why he’s even here. Imagine the two of them debating in a town hall.
You know President Trump thrives on stage. It’s why, unlike the first debate between he and moderator Chris Wallace, the second one would have shown how good Trump is when he’s with American voters.
You see how President Trump’s children treat their dad, and you see “family” front and center. Biden’s relationship with his son Hunter is something different. One family seems genuinely proud of America, while the other makes a living off her. Voters aren’t stupid.
Survive and Thrive this Month.
Warm regards,
E.J.,
“Your Survival Guy”
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P.S. How DO YOU Treat the Lunch Ladies?: VP Debate REVIEW
In considering the VP debate, I can’t stop thinking about Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris as school teachers we’ve all had at some point in our life. Last night, Pence was the teacher you remember as being tough, yet fair, and you knew the rules of the road. With Harris, you remember the teacher who was always running late to class, absent all the time for career “advancement” days, or sick, and the rules are “because I said so!”
You can see teacher Mike greeting the lunch ladies by name and thanking them for the extra cookie. When Harris walks through the line, she doesn’t know a single name, swooping through the same way every single day.
When Harris said how proud her mother would be of her if she were still alive today, you didn’t feel the emotion you’d expect in such a powerful statement. Rather it felt rehearsed, and that being VP is yet another step to the real prize: Being the first woman president of the United States. In her mind, she’s already won, casually referring to her running mate as “Joe.”
In contrast, Vice President Pence spoke with deference to the American people and the office he serves. When he spoke, Harris squirmed. She looked at him with a “how dare you question me?” expression as if sitting in front of angry parents at a teacher-parent conference—they’re wondering why little Johnny’s doing so poorly in her class—she’s thinking, “Wait ’til I get my hands on that kid tomorrow. He’ll be sorry. And so will you.”
Harris speaks with a shaky, insecure voice that screams inexperience, where Pence sounds seasoned. She acts as though she knows best, and your opinion not only doesn’t matter, but she looks down on you with a raised brow as if she’s thinking, “Do you know who I am? I can’t wait until I’m in charge. You’ll get what’s coming to you.” And that’s leftism in a nutshell.
Listening to Harris felt like watching Lucy hold the football for Charlie Brown. Do you really think she’s trustworthy on taxes, removing the filibuster to pack the Supreme Court, law and order, and the Green New Deal?
Bottom line: Mike is the favorite teacher you remember for a reason: He was there to teach you. To help you improve your life and be the best version of you, even if it took some tough love. Harris wasn’t there for you. She was there for herself and the next opportunity for advancement. You were a distraction, you were lazy, and that wasn’t her problem—she had better things to do.
P.P.S. It’s the COVID Stupid: Don’t Stop BELIEVIN’
And just like that, President Trump is back in the saddle. Boohoo cries the left as the president’s short stay (could have been shorter) at Walter Reed comes to an end. Who has more fun than him? The down in the mouth left never met a crisis it loved so much. “Don’t go home!” they cry.
Because when a 74-year-old man shows he can kick COVID-19 over a long-weekend, their greatest fears come true: They’re laughed at and called out for being WRONG from the very beginning. President Trump is living proof that the fear of getting sick far outweighs the risk of keeping the healthy locked up.
Lockdowns and social distancing are doing harm beyond repair. Consider the damage: You don’t get to redo being a seven-year-old, riding your bike through town experiencing freedom for the very first time in your life. You don’t get to go on adventures that make you late for dinner.
Dinner tables across the country, if anyone puts their phones down or gets away from Netflix, are a steam-cooker of tension. How can anyone smile with so much on their mind? Imagine how your seven-year-old self would feel when mom and dad can’t get along. Sick to your stomach. It’s not your fault.
When you talk with your grandfather—if you are even allowed to anymore—you see the concern on his face. He’s holding the Saturday paper, pressing it with ink-stained thumbs and forefingers. He sees CDs pay a pittance, houses going for prices he could never afford, and a headline that makes him laugh like a comic strip: “Federal Reserve Says No Inflation.” He reads that the wealthy flee the city to places like Aspen, paying premiums for modern flat roof manses—while he’s just trying to keep his own roof over his head.
You see the lockdown mess from the communist governor in Michigan, the school closings, the union leaders’ puppet de Blasio in New York City, Disneyland “the unhappiest place on earth” as 20,000 are laid off, the $600 check you never got. Then you wonder how many Purple states will Trump turn Red, because he unmasked COVID-19.
P.P.P.S. #1 Debate Review: Meet the Catalysts Stirring this Election
If you woke up the morning after the first presidential debate in your new country home—after having escaped a city that looked nothing like where you originally hoped to raise your family—you were wondering how blue state politicians let it all go to pot. You’re not political, you’re a successful businessperson, and you never liked the combativeness of politics.
The first debate didn’t help—but you’re ignoring the noise and paying attention like never before—not because of the words politicians use—because you’re staring out your window with a cup of coffee in hand, looking at a backyard you thought you’d never have. You know the truth. You don’t need to be told how things are. You’re voting for the first time against the blue state politicians who ruined your home life in the city.
If you’re still stuck in the city, life was always too busy for politics. But today, you don’t need guys like Cuomo and De Blasio to tell you how things are. You’ve got a family to raise. You’re staring at a ghost city, thinking about the life you used to live, watching it vanish before your very eyes. You know time is running out. More than ever before, you hope your vote matters.
Displacement and frustration are the catalysts that will stir this election. In my biased mind, you have “open for business” President Donald Trump or “here’s the deal” former VP Joe Biden. One is fighting for you, while the other isn’t quite sure for whom he fights. Only one candidate is offering a path to the America you hope to return to. It’s that simple.
America’s new transplants and forgotten men are in the political game like never before. This year their lives truly depend upon it.
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E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy
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