Democrats Should Just Say It: Biden Is Probably About to Trounce Trump

This is from the New York Times today:

Whispering? Democrats ought to be yelling it from the rooftops.

There is a strange belief among political consultants that if you express optimism you are likely to make people complacent. Hey, my guy is going to win, so I guess there’s no point in doing any more phone banking. But this is ridiculous. It’s a fundamental of human nature that people like to back winners. If you promise them that they’re part of a history-making landslide that will rid the country of its worst president ever, the result will be more energy, not less. What’s more, it’s actually true that Biden is expanding his lead:

I don’t have a crystal ball, but it’s a mistake to let the trauma of 2016 color everything. Right now, nothing is going Trump’s way. His attempted smear of Hunter Biden has mostly just aroused disgust. His rallies are feeble replays of 2016. He personally hosted an infamous superspreader event at the White House and still refuses to take COVID-19 seriously. He’s losing the support of women in droves. His attack on Biden as a pawn of AOC and the extremist wing of the Democratic Party is so absurd that people just laugh at it. Senate Republicans have all but abandoned him as a sure loser. He’s behind in national polling by an astonishing ten percentage points.

So could Biden win in a landslide? Sure he could. In fact, I’d guess that with a big last-minute push it’s close to a certainty.

POSTSCRIPT: Just remember: 2016 was a fluke, not a harbinger of the future. Trump is a buffoon and after four years in office most of the country knows it.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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