There has never been a race for the White House in the United States like the 2020 Presidential Reality Show®
Stealing a page from the recent Ukrainian election where a comedian who played president on a TV show trounced the U.S. installed puppet president, in America, a cast of side show contestants are lining up to beat out America’s #1 Reality Show Champion, President Donald Trump.
As we go to press there are 23 contestants, the latest being New York’s Mayor Bill “Bullshit” de Blasio, another political fraud who’s greatest accomplishment is laying claim to the lowest popularity rating of any New York City Mayor since polling began.
And of the two Democrats leading in the polls to win their primary – Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders – both would have been disqualified (as well as the sitting president) according to President Dwight D. Eisenhower who noted, “No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know.”
AND THE WINNER IS?
On the broad Democratic agenda, especially aimed at its legions of Millennial and Generation Z voters, who in raw numbers constitute the largest voter segments, the key issues are: climate change, free health care, universal basic income, gun control, free college education, income inequality and taxing the rich.
For older Democrats with strong party identity, “anyone but Trump” is their driving motivation to get out and vote. And that desire, along with the Democratic Party establishment, has them focused on “who has the best shot to beat Trump?”
So far, the leader is former Vice President Joe Biden who launched his campaign on the guiding principle that “Trump must go.”
In the latest poll, Biden has 36 percent of the likely voter pie, 23 percentage points higher than his closest election 2020 competitor, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.
And while Millennials have been presumed to be staunch Sanders supporters, they favor him by only 2 percent over Biden.
What must be noted is that the Election Day 2020 is a year-and-a-half away and up to that time no one can predict the wild cards… and the wildest of cards is the Trump card.
SMALL TALK ON WAR, SILENCE ON PEACE
With the exception of the non-interventionist foreign policy platform of Tulsi Gabbard, the Congresswoman from Hawaii who ranks near the bottom of polls among Democratic contenders, up until the recent escalation of military threats against Iran and President Trump’s threatening tweets of action, Democratic primary candidates didn’t have a lot to say about foreign policy.
Should geopolitical tensions dramatically increase prior to Election Day, poll leader Biden, with a long pro-war track record, will lose support among a war weary Democratic base.
THE DEMS’ DISADVANTAGE
The Trends Journal, in May of 2016, was the first magazine to predict Donald Trump would win the White House, while the polls and other media projected Hillary Clinton as the odds-on-favorite.
On the major issues that will shape the 2020 election will be the economy (capitalism vs. socialism), health care, taxes, trade, immigration/open borders, equity market conditions… and foreign policy issues should global tensions escalate, and/or terrorists strike America, plus other possible wild cards.
Thus, should these issues dominate, and with President Trump holding a sustained 90 percent approval rating among likely Republican voters, we forecast as the field stands now for Democratic hopefuls, Trump could again lose the popular vote but again win the blue-collar swing states.
However, should Biden win the nomination, with his pro-union/pro labor common man stance (despite his past pro-Nafta, bringing China into the World Trade Organization and championing the Trans-Pacific Partnership) amiable, back-slapping, hand-shaking Uncle Joe will garner strong support in swing states, particularly Pennsylvania where Trump won in 2016 but Hometown Boy Biden now handily trumps him in the polls.
BIDEN NOT BETO
This past January, two months before Beto O’Rouke announced his candidacy, and in the March Trends Journal after it became official, Gerald Celente forecast O’Rouke would win the Democratic presidential nomination.
He has changed that forecast.
Labeling him as the White Obama, Celente noted that O’Rourke maximized his social media skills to build an enormous small-donor network, raised a record-shattering $80 million in his failed 2018 campaign to unseat Ted Cruz and quickly raised $6.1 million on the day he announced his candidacy to seek the Democratic presidential nomination.
Another factor that helped shape that forecast was the steady streams of pro-Beto publicity by the major mainstream media during, and continuing after, his 2018 race for the Texas Senate.
Indeed, as noted in our Trends Journal forecast, The New York Times ran a series of pro-Beto front page features, including one of Mr. O’Rourke following his appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. We wrote in the March issue:
“Will you be running?” she asked. Declaring his admiration for Barack Obama, who he said “was very generous in sharing what his thought process was,” Beto played off the “Hope and Change We Can Believe In” 2008 Obama campaign slogan. His vacuous reply was that he could “be that person…to bring this country together around the big things that we know we should be able to do.”
Celente noted the importance of getting even tepid support from Oprah since he had forecast Obama the winner in the race for the White House in the Summer of 2008 after Oprah took Obama under her wing. He wrote: “Transformed into a flawlessly packaged and directed Harpo production, the teleprompted orator promised he would ‘heal the nation and repair the world.”
NOW AND THEN
However, the cast of candidates has greatly expanded since that forecast, and the Beto act that played well in Texas is flopping nationally. Among his greatest liabilities in winning the nomination are his pro-open border platform, weak economic policies, scant foreign policy initiatives and over-emphasis on climate change.
Now, after three years of a Trump presidency, we forecast (minus the wild cards) that Joe Biden is the people’s choice to restore stability, tranquility, safety and unity to the Divided States of America. TJ