October 6, 2023
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Pennsylvania in play in 2024 as Trump, Biden trade 47 percent and 45 percent in two polls and independents are the kingmaker
By Robert Romano
Pennsylvania looks to be a very interesting contest in 2024 with former President Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden in a Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 Quinnipiac poll 47 percent to 45 percent after Biden was leading Trump in Pennsylvania in a prior Sept. 19 to Sept. 28 Susquehanna poll by the same 47 percent to 45 percent margin.
Fair to say, the race is tied in a state Democrats cannot afford to lose a short 13 months until Nov. 2024 when Biden will stand for reelection.
In the Quinnipiac breakdown, Trump draws a surprising 19 percent among Blacks and otherwise leads independents 48 percent to 39 percent. The result on independents in Susquehanna was reversed by a similar margin in Biden’s favor, 42 percent to 31 percent, and appears to be the difference in the two polls.
Biden’s low 42 percent reading in Susquehanna among independents should be cause for concern to Biden’s team, as his disapproval in the Quinnipiac stands at a whopping 63 percent among independents, with only 31 percent approving. That is simply abysmal
On the Republican side, Trump running strong in the state has consequences not just for the race for the White House, but also House races and Sen. Bob Casey’s (D-Pa.) reelection bid.
Unseating incumbent presidents isn’t easy, and neither is keeping electoral majorities—especially small ones like the narrow five-seat majority House Republicans have—when running against an incumbent who usually picks up seats if reelected. Suffice to say, if Biden wins reelection with the popular vote, Democrats will almost certainly reclaim the House of Representatives. And if he wins Pennsylvania, then Bob Casey is probably safe too.
Whereas a strong Trump run nationwide and in Pennsylvania puts all that in play, and other states like Ohio where Trump is favored and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is running for reelection.
If nothing else, Trump’s continued strength in the Rust Belt should give Republicans some hope that a third Trump run could have positive downstream ballot implications, even if Trump were to lose narrowly.
Key issues sited in the Susquehanna poll included crime and public safety (46 percent), abortion (40 percent) and inflation and the economy (44 percent). The top two issues of crime and the economy appear to favor Trump, while abortion appears to favor Biden. Whereas in Quinnipiac it was the economy (30 percent), preserving democracy (23 percent) and immigration (15 percent).
Pennsylvania looks to be a very interesting contest in 2024 with former President Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden in a Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 Quinnipiac poll 47 percent to 45 percent after Biden was leading Trump in Pennsylvania in a prior Sept. 19 to Sept. 28 Susquehanna poll by the same 47 percent to 45 percent margin.
Fair to say, the race is tied in a state Democrats cannot afford to lose a short 13 months until Nov. 2024 when Biden will stand for reelection.
In the Quinnipiac breakdown, Trump draws a surprising 19 percent among Blacks and otherwise leads independents 48 percent to 39 percent. The result on independents in Susquehanna was reversed by a similar margin in Biden’s favor, 42 percent to 31 percent, and appears to be the difference in the two polls.
Biden’s low 42 percent reading in Susquehanna among independents should be cause for concern to Biden’s team, as his disapproval in the Quinnipiac stands at a whopping 63 percent among independents, with only 31 percent approving. That is simply abysmal
Pennsylvania looks to be a very interesting contest in 2024 with former President Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden in a Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 Quinnipiac poll 47 percent to 45 percent after Biden was leading Trump in Pennsylvania in a prior Sept. 19 to Sept. 28 Susquehanna poll by the same 47 percent to 45 percent margin.
Fair to say, the race is tied in a state Democrats cannot afford to lose a short 13 months until Nov. 2024 when Biden will stand for reelection.
In the Quinnipiac breakdown, Trump draws a surprising 19 percent among Blacks and otherwise leads independents 48 percent to 39 percent. The result on independents in Susquehanna was reversed by a similar margin in Biden’s favor, 42 percent to 31 percent, and appears to be the difference in the two polls.
Biden’s low 42 percent reading in Susquehanna among independents should be cause for concern to Biden’s team, as his disapproval in the Quinnipiac stands at a whopping 63 percent among independents, with only 31 percent approving. That is simply abysmal
and is only offset by Trump’s own 59 percent unfavorability among independents, many of whom invariably say they are voting for him. Interestingly, just 30 percent of independents say that have a favorable opinion of Trump, but 48 percent say they are voting for him.
This indicates a strong anti-Biden vote that are driving independents towards Trump, even if he wasn’t their first choice. How independents go determines control of Pennsylvania, and likely the path to 270 Electoral College votes in 2024.
Overall, Biden’s job approval in Pennsylvania is a crappy 41 percent, with 55 percent disapproving, something that can ultimately eat away at Biden’s reelection hopes because it indicates he losing more followers than he is gaining. He is vulnerable. From Republicans and Trump’s perspective, that makes Pennsylvania and 2024 itself ripe for the picking.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
James Bovard: Is the FBI turning Trump supporters into terrorist targets?
By James Bovard
Donald Trump’s supporters are now in the FBI terrorist-investigation crosshairs, according to a new report in Newsweek.
The agency has created “a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers”; it’s targeting strident Republicans with some of the same counterterrorism methods honed to fight al Qaeda.
Federal bureaucrats heaved together a bunch of letters to contrive an ominous new acronym for the latest peril to domestic tranquility.
The result: AGAAVE — “anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism” — which looks like a typo for a sugar substitute.
The great majority of the FBI’s “current ‘anti-government’ investigations are of Trump supporters,” William Arkin, a highly respected investigative journalist, reported in Newsweek.
The FBI recently vastly expanded the supposed AGAAVE peril by broadening suspicion from “furtherance of ideological agendas” to “furtherance of political and/or social agendas.”
Anyone who has an agenda different from Team Biden’s could be AGAAVE’d for his own good.
The Biden administration is vilifying anti-government opinions at the same time judges are exposing federal crimes.
Federal court decisions in July and September condemned the Biden censorship regime — and those rulings were preceded by Supreme Court decisions striking down President Joe Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness scheme and vaccine mandates.
But Team Biden still presumes anyone who suspects the feds are violating the Constitution is up to no good.
The FBI is required to have (or claim to have) solid information before launching a criminal investigation. But the bureau needs almost zero information to open an “assessment.”
The FBI conducted more than 5,500 domestic-terrorism “assessments” in 2021, a 10-fold increase since 2017 and a 50-fold increase since 2013.
“Assessments are the closest thing to domestic spying that exists in America and generally not talked about by the Bureau,” Arkin noted.
Those assessments could prove perilous because the official demand for terrorists far exceeds the domestic supply. A top federal official told Newsweek last year: “We’ve become too prone to labeling anything we don’t like as extremism, and then any extremist as a terrorist.”
The House Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee warns that “the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially supporting the Administration’s political narrative” that domestic violent extremism is “the ‘greatest threat’ facing the United States.”
FBI whistleblower Steve Friend complained of current FBI leadership: “There is this belief that half the country are domestic terrorists and we can’t have a conversation with them. There is a fundamental belief that unless you are voicing what we agree . . . you are the enemy.”
Did the Biden administration secretly want Newsweek to vindicate the fears of legions of Trump supporters?
Perhaps those “assessments” are repeating a tactic used against Vietnam War protesters: FBI agents were encouraged to conduct frequent interviews with antiwar activists to “enhance the paranoia endemic in such circles” and “get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox,” according to an FBI memo from that era.
The more paranoid Trump supporters become, the easier it will be for Team Biden to portray them as public menaces.
Biden’s war on extremism could become a self-fulfilling prophecy that destroys American political legitimacy. An official in the Office of Director of National Intelligence lamented: “So we have the president increasing his own inflammatory rhetoric which leads Donald Trump and the Republicans to do the same” — and the media follow suit.
Biden is exempt from official suspicion even when he denounced Republicans as fascists who want to destroy democracy. Yet if Republicans sound equally overheated, Biden’s FBI has pretexts to target them.
Will the FBI’s interventions in the 2024 presidential election be even more brazen than its 2016 and 2020 stunts? Will the agency exploit its “assessments” to recruit knuckleheads to engage in another pre-election Keystone Kops plot to kidnap a governor, as it did in Michigan in 2020?
New crackdowns on purported extremists are especially perilous when FBI seems to stand for “Following Biden’s Instructions.”
A 1976 Senate report on FBI abuses warned: “The American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.”
Unfortunately, Americans may not learn the damning details of another FBI “secret war” until long after the next election.
To view online: https://nypost.com/2023/10/05/is-the-fbi-turning-trump-supporters-into-terrorist-targets/