DECODING DONALD - the changing stance of the President and how he's still in the game

There is still time for Donald J Trump to win the game of our lifetime by creating maximum uncertainty, threatening not to accept anything but a resounding win by Joe Biden and returning to the divisive, deceptive and definitely winning strategy of his one for one win against the odds four years ago.

In the next month we will see the critical battle for the mind of the market - the Stock Exchange is steadily rising as the big money is betting that Donald J Trump will protect their interest in lower taxation, environmental relaxation and restoration of law and order in the big blue states.

This will include the announcement of a woman who could become the President in the next term and three debates that are expected to pull down "Sleepy Joe" to confound the pollsters, the bookies and the Democrat controlled House confounding the critics, confounding the bookies and winning 270 seats in the US Electoral College.

The critics, especially CNN after-darkers, continue the relentless pursuit of the President as an irresponsible, unpredictable and undesirable failure who is on the brink of failure to get his second term for his failure to wear a mask, take national leadership and thousands of lies.

The bookies show that the weight of money in their bags is now shifting to the belief that the smart money has now shifted to Joe Biden to have nearly a two to one prospect of becoming the next President by staying home in his basement and not even turning up to his own coronation as the challenger.

And the Pollsters are proving yet again, with a range from 15% lead:4% lag that nobody has much faith in any of their predictions of the likely outcome of the big race that stops the US nation after the running of the Melbourne Cup downunder.

Even the best of the US polling aggregators - Nate Silver's 538 statistically oriented commentary and Real Clear Politics continue to point out that The Donald is yet to be beaten and continues his successful capture of free media attention, total domination of door-to-door campaigning and voter enthusiasm from his "base".

538 says "There’s a long way to go in this campaign. We still have to see how the public responds to Biden’s vice presidential pick and the party conventions. We don’t know what course the pandemic will take or how the economy will change. For now, the fallout from the coronavirus appears to be hurting Trump’s chances, but that’s not written in stone — and neither is Biden’s sizable edge. If the race tightens a little, Biden would likely still be a decent favorite. If the race tightens more than that — and it could — Trump can win a second term.

"Election Day is now just three months away, and the overall trajectory of the race hasn’t changed much recently: Joe Biden continues to hold a sizable lead over President Trump. Biden is now up by 8 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, and he has an advantage of 5 points or more in several key battleground states like Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin."

"This means that the sizable advantage Biden currently holds isn’t the product of a convention-induced sugar high but rather the larger electoral environment, which is very poor for Trump. That’s no guarantee Biden’s lead will hold — it’s hard to know what the post-convention bounces will look like this year, for example, given that they’re remote affairs and scheduled back to back."

Turning to RCP we find that there are dozens of polls being conducted that range from outright push polling to outlandishly antiTrumpers that collectively suggest that the President is continuing a steady improvement despite the daily deadly virus counts in the Swing States that he must turn around in the next two months.

If we are to believe the Rasmussen poll, President Trump is only behind Biden nationally by less than the margin of error at 45% to 48% which means that the race would repeat the pattern of 2016 where Hilary Clinton won a majority of the national vote in the big blue city stakes but lost out in the red rural states.

The average of the polls has Biden ahead by around eight points (and falling), but beating the Clinton results in the key swing states by sufficient to reach the magic number of 270 out of the 538 college votes. Biden seems to be starting from a better baseline than Clinton. Crucially, he enjoys a higher level of average support than Clinton ever did.

Decoding the Donald's run from behind tactics requires an appreciation of the fact that his base loves his representation of their sense of neglect, narrowing economic futures and sense of being left out of the global economic transformation represented by the tech giants and the big business beneficiaries of trickle down economics.

The Police union has now turned on Joe Biden in the face of Democrat calls to "defund the police" and despite Joe's faith, the Catholics for Trump are actively campaigning for a further conservative to be added to the Supreme Court in the hope that vacancies will allow them to reverse the earlier abortion law rulings.

The division we see between the two parties today is not merely on policy, but on principles that Donald J Trump is seen to push against the woke majority of educated, white women and progressive minorities.

The division we see between the two parties today is not merely on policy, but on principle. The political divide is not simply about prudential judgments, but about "the fundamental rights of man" and "the salvation of souls" referred to by the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Catechism, and numerous other sources.

A spokesman for this conservative force says "Some Catholics are wary of Trump and to them I always say, it’s not about his past failings, but his present policies and their future impact on our children and grandchildren, on our courts and culture. We are electing a president, not canonizing a saint. Look at what he’s done, both for the unborn, for religious freedom, and for America. He reveres the Constitution of the United States. The same cannot be said of his presumptive opponent and the party from which he sprang."

On the other side of the campaign Mother Jones points out that the President is shifting his ground to once again appear to be flexible and responsible, and that this is systematically eating into the Biden momentum.

"There is acceptance that the President has begrudgingly shifted his stance on masks. His campaign sent out an email to supporters telling them that it is “patriotic” to wear a mask.

During his latest White House briefings, when he reads his opening statement that includes encouraging the use of masks. Trump’s self-obsessed behavior, his dismissal of expert advice, his attacks on news media outlets that report the awful truths of the pandemic, his focus on the positive economic indicators that exist within an economic calamity (look at the Dow Jones!).

But what is surprising is that Trump, perhaps the most self-interested man ever to reside in the White House, cannot see that his own and much-cherished personal interests—notably, getting re-elected—are aligned with the public interest of curtailing the pandemic. "

This week we will know who Biden anoints as his successor. It is likely to be a "black woman" with loads of capacity to take over if he should not run again. It will also give the bookies, the punters and the rest of the world an indication of the capacity of Donald to exorcise the view that he is out of the race.

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