The British tabloid Daily Mail reported on Tuesday the results of its most recent polling of American likely voters in November’s president election and noted that Donald Trump’s lead over incumbent Joe Biden continues to widen.
Trump was two points behind Biden in June but was one point ahead of Biden in September and October. Now Trump sports a four-point lead over Biden. As the Daily Mail reported:
[T]hey show where momentum lies. Trump was two points behind Biden in the first DailyMail.com poll in June, before holding a one-point lead in September and in October.
Those polls show that Trump has gone from four points behind with independents to two points ahead.
Meanwhile, Biden’s overwhelming lead with young women has fizzled from 12 points to two points. And white voters have moved increasingly to Trump at the same time.
Hidden in the survey is a critical element giving comfort to Trump supporters: his support among independents is gaining ground.
And that independent vote will determine November’s outcome, according to Wayne Grudem, a professor of Theology and Biblical Studies at Phoenix University and author of his monumental Systematic Theology.
Grudem has been watching and commenting on the political tides in the United States from a theologically conservative point of view for decades and is a supporter of Trump. In an op-ed in Newsweek two weeks ago, Grudem explained:
I voted for Donald Trump twice. I published several op-ed pieces defending him and his policies. I spoke in support of Trump on podcasts and before live audiences.
I do not regret those decisions and I remain convinced that, given the alternatives (Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden), supporting Trump in 2016 and 2020 was the right choice.
Grudem was not disappointed:
Speaking as a professor who has taught theology and ethics for 46 years, I can say that all of these actions seem to me to be consistent with a Judeo-Christian world view as found in the Bible as a whole.
And, as an evangelical Christian, I appreciate that Trump welcomed several evangelicals into cabinet posts and other positions of high influence in his administration. (Biden has none in his cabinet so far as I know.)
But Grudem thinks Trump should drop out of the presidential race or run the grave risk of losing to whomever the Democrats run:
While Trump remains popular among conservative Republicans (and thus he is favored to win the GOP nomination), his support among independent voters is abysmal, and independents will decide the general election.
The latest Gallup poll showed a remarkable decline in party loyalty for both parties. 28% of Americans now consider themselves Republicans, 24% now consider themselves Democrats, and a whopping 46% say they are “Independents.” A candidate will have to win a majority of Independents in order to win the election.
And that is where Trump comes up short.
What about polls like the one just reported above from the British Daily Mail?
To me, they mean nothing because I don’t believe for a minute that the leadership of the Democrat Party will allow such an unpopular president as Biden to be their 2024 presidential candidate.
I think the Democratic leaders are wrong about many policy convictions, but I don’t think they are politically stupid. They are politically shrewd, and their eventual candidate will be much younger and much more popular.
According to the Daily Mail some 18 percent of those polled remain undecided over whom they will support in November. The Republicans and the Democrats split the remaining electorate, and each is entrenched in their support of their likely candidates. So it all comes down to independents.
According to the Daily Mail, “the movement [to Trump and away from Biden] is partially due to momentum among independents, which has gone from a 4-point deficit for Trump to a 2-point lead” in the latest poll.
There are 10 months remaining before the general election, plenty of time for Trump to continue to woo the independent voter.
But there’s another factor at work: the blatant attempt by Democrats and their allies in the media to rid themselves of Trump by whatever means possible. As Grudem noted:
My own view (others may differ) is that the legal charges against Trump do not stem from impartial attempts to pursue equal justice under the law but instead stem from the horrible misuse of prosecutorial authority by Trump-haters who first selected their victim (Donald Trump) and then searched high and low for some crime they could charge him with committing.
I think that the charges against Trump are a malicious misuse of the courts as weapons against political opponents. But the trials will go on, and they must be taken into account.
And as those trials go on, and on, and on, even the most jaded independent voter is likely to wake up to the political agenda behind them, and vote for Trump out of disgust for the Democrats and their malevolent maneuvers to rid themselves of their mortal enemy, Donald Trump.
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