Let's Go Brandon is going to be the nominee

You know how I know?  This CNBC article indicating that the Democratic establishment has not convinced him to leave; now they're backing the man.  Despite all the craziness that ensued in the media from the debate about wanting Let's Go Brandon to step aside, as Bill Burr once ranted "It ain't happening!"

Former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton on Friday tried to do some damage control following President Joe Biden’s debate fumble against his November election opponent, former President Donald Trump.

“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself,” Obama said in a post on X, linking to Biden’s campaign website. “Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.”

Several hours later, Clinton mimicked the defensive play.

Sounds like they're now in a prevent defense.  Damage control for Democrats is defense against their own media and base, not against Republicans.

By the way, a great takeaway here is that it's easy to tell we're winning because our focus (at least in my case), is on what the Democrats are doing, not what the GOP is doing.  The lesson there for the GOP, as aptly demonstrated by Donald Trump during the debate, stay out of the way when your opponent is shooting themselves in the foot.  Let's hope the GOP do that this election cycle.

Comey-Clinton link exposed by Durham

This is sickening. 

That's not all.

Democrats spying on Trump was beyond Watergate

According to a report by The Federalist, the spying on Trump was bad that it vastly exceeded the Watergate scandal. And apparently, there's more legal bombshells to come.

Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway validated former President Donald Trump’s weekend claim that the latest revelations to emerge from the Durham probe expose the Russia hoax scandal as worse than Watergate.

On Friday, the latest filing from John Durham’s special counsel investigation alleged that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid tech workers to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House.

“It’s not just the president’s view that this is worse than Watergate,” Hemingway said on Fox News’ “MediaBuzz.” “If you want to remember what happened in Watergate, that was a relatively low-level break-in to a Democratic Party office and then a cover-up from the White House. … The spying operation against Donald Trump wasn’t just during the campaign, they were also spying on White House servers [and] Trump Tower while he was president.”

Of course this is all a year too late but at least it's validation that we are not a bunch of lunatics for suspecting this. Now the need is to get this story out there, loudly.

Why is this not front page news everywhere?

Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every city except for 4 in key swing states.  Yet he got 13 million more votes than she did in 2016? That's a remarkable and implausible coincidence and the math just doesn't make sense.

My predictions have been wrong all along (slightly)

Two days ago I pointed out that if the polls in 2020 had 85% of the same October bias as did the polls in October 2016, Trump was leading Biden at 247 to 243 electoral college votes with 48 electoral college undecided. Today, with the same bias level,  and giving Virginia, New Mexico and all of Maine to Biden, Trump is leading Biden 264 to 260 with only New Hampshire and Minnesota remaining undecided.  

If Trump  gets Maine District 2 and wins New Hampshire, he actually gets to 269 - the dreaded tie scenario if Biden were to win Minnesota.  However I took a closer look at North Carolina which I was seeing as perilously close.  If Trump were to win that he would actually have enough electoral college votes to win the election even without New Hampshire and Main District 2.

It got me thinking - I'm applying both my own view of the 2016 bias as well as the 538 pollster bias. I could be double counting the bias.  But thanks to a video (I cannot relocate the exact one) from Red Eagle Politics (a great YouTube channel worth checking out), I decided to take a closer look at the 538 pollster bias ratings. As was pointed out on the video I saw, the pollster ratings provided by 538 are kind of suspect. The New York Times/Siena polls are rated as a +0.7% bias towards - Republicans??? 

Looking Just at North Carolina polls in October 2016, they had Clinton +2 (late September) and Clinton +8 (late October).  In their poll of the last three days before the election they rated it a 44-44 tie, with a margin of error +/-3.5% (their CYA poll).  In North Carolina in 2016 Trump won 49.8 to 46.2.  That represents a victory of 3.6%, actually just outside their margin of error. And in fact, they underrepresented the Trump support by 5.8% and Clinton by 2.2%.  Clearly (1) they got it wrong by even their own Margin of Error on 1 of the 2 data points as well as the overall result, and (2) how the hell are they rated Republican +0.7%? What is that rating based on? Perhaps congressional polling results? It doesn't matter, their bias factor clearly cannot be  attributable to upcoming election at a presidential level. That's just one example, and I found others.

The takeaway - The 538 pollster bias is sketchy at best, and I am backing it out of my calculations.

Stay tuned for a revised update of my polling-adjusted view of the electoral college situation later today. That's not to say all of the 538 data is bunk.  The do provide a pollster grade rating that is, for the most part, reasonable - especially when it comes to lesser known pollsters.  I will still be filtering out those pollsters that they have rated below a C+.  That may be a generous inclusion of me when it comes to certain pollsters, but I do still have other means of filtering out garbage polls (old polls, Margin of error issues, sample sizes to small for example) and those will remain intact. 

I expect my look later today will be more accurate than what I have been showing and I expect it to break slightly more in Trump's favor.

***How the polls understated Trump in 2016, and what it means for 2020***

Looking back at the 2016 Trump vs. Clinton election, There was some interesting shy Trump voter effect.  I'm not worried about the actual results in 2020 if this time the polling misses the same voters it did in 2016. Trump's support was often understated.* Below are some of the key states showing how the polls got it wrong leading up to the 2016 election by month.  Interestingly, the polls in 2016 often understated* Clinton support, albeit typically by a smaller percentage.  That all could be from the impact of third party votes switching late, or cheating.  But the polls having Biden +15 are likely experiencing the same mistakes they did last time.

*Note, where the number is negative, it indicates the polls have overstated the candidate's support in that month. Where both candidates' numbers equal exactly zero, it indicates there was no polling in that time frame.

In Florida: Trump highly over-performed his polling right into November. Hillary Clinton in October polls was actually doing worse than her polling, though by November the polls were back to understating her actual results.

In Georgia: Polling generally improved month over month for both candidates, but Trump was hurt more by being understated throughout the late polling cycle.

In Iowa: The polls massively underestimated Trump but were fairly close on Clinton.

In Michigan: The story is similar to Iowa, in October short-selling his support by almost 8% while overselling Hillary's by 1%!

In Minnesota: In October the total error of support for Clinton and Trump was 8%!

In North Carolina: The polls were off by a combined support error of 4.6% in October and even more in November.

In New Hampshire: There was an interesting reversal of error in November but in October the effect was a +8 shift towards Hillary.

In Ohio: Trump was again slighted. You get the idea and pattern forming among all the states here, right?

In Pennsylvania: Much the same as other states, the Trump shy voters are not getting picked up just like elsewhere.  Unless, just like elsewhere, the differential that largely evaporates in November was fictitious to begin with.  Did the pollsters suddenly figure out how to spot shy Trump voters in November 2016? Or did they not want to be labelled as untrustworthy, and had to start reflecting the truth? The former is more likely true because there are pollsters who largely got it right in 2016 (Trafalgar) that are showing a tighter race than other pollsters who are still showing large Biden leads today. Remember, these graphs are the pollsters in the aggregate by month, not differentiating between correct and incorrect pollsters. A lot (if not most) of the same players are showing the same type of results this time around - both the Trafalgars and the Ipsoses of the polling universe.

In Texas: Here's one they hurt Hillary, dramatically (as well as Trump).  But most notably in every month but October.  October is THE month this time around, since there are only 2 days worth of potential polling in November, and more realistically, just 1 day.

In Virginia: The bias probably doesn't matter because Biden is obscenely ahead in the state.  However, it raises the question - are the polls (either deliberately or through error) overstating the Biden lead even more strongly that they did for Hillary Clinton?  Or is Biden actually really that far ahead?  If he is, the contest is over. But if not, what is the ratio of Hillary oversampled voters in 2016 to Biden oversampled voters in 2020?  I have in all of my assessments so far assumed it's 1-1.  Interestingly in my analyses so far, if the Biden bias is only 85% of Clinton's, he still wins the election. At 90% it's not decided yet and at 95% or more, Trump wins.

Finally in Wisconsin: The error was clear.  In November they finally got Clinton support right, but there was still a massive undercounting of Trump support.

So what's it all mean? It means GO VOTE. For Trump.  Nothing matters - not the polls, not the early voting split, nothing matters except the final tally.  I have statistical knowledge and I'm saying the polls don't matter as much as you are being told.  If all the polls were done properly, they might.  But there's a lot of bias at work, both political and technical.  We won't understand it until after the election, and then and only then, is there a chance for pollsters to start correcting their mistakes of 2016 and 2020 (if the latter are still suffering from the same  issues as the former). But that's not the election.  The election is you turning out and making a difference.

A simplified election view and an explainer of why Trump is actually winning

 Based on the latest RealClearPolitics summary of polls, without looking at the partisan split and simply removing the partisan bias per FiveThirtyEight as well as the time-specific bias in polls by state that was evident in 2016 versus the actual results, I get some interesting results.

When I say time-specific bias, I think I owe an example. In Florida in 2016, in October, the RCP polls had Clinton at 48.2% and Trump at 42.4% support. The actual election had Trump garner 49% and Clinton at 47.8%.  So Clinton support was overstated in October in the polls by only 0.4%, but at the same time, president Trump got 6.6% more of the total vote than polls projected.  Combined, the pro-Clinton effect of Florida polls in October was the Clinton 'victory' margin was overstated by 7%.

It's true that the polls were not as far off in 2016 by the time November rolled around, but prior to that, they were either very wrong, deliberately very misleading or else something big changed in the last week to sway a massive shift in voter preference. I don't think the latter scenario was the case, even though Comey re-opened the Hillary Clinton email investigation in late October.  Why do I think that?  Because in a good number of the swing states the Hillary bias did not disappear in November polls.

What's more likely is that the polls were being used to push a narrative and that as election day closed in, they had to become more accurate or be viewed as untrustworthy in the future.  The bias often persisted right up to the election in 2016, but it was more muted than it was in November. 

Polls today have Biden outperforming Hillary's 2016 polls versus Donald Trump. Is that a concern?  Definitely - remember that Hillary Clinton had almost as high unfavorables in polls as  did Donald Trump.  Biden is, inexplicably, more likeable than Hillary Clinton to many.  That's why he's in hiding and not wanting to debate Trump again (ignore the lies that it is about Trump having COVID-19).

But it's possible the polls are biased towards Biden as much or more (or less) than they were  towards Hillary Clinton.  The bias is not easy to gauge.  Maybe by 2024 I'll be able to do that.  For now, I'm going to assume that the bias is the same for Biden as it was for Clinton.

With all that said - here's what my electoral college map looks like, removing the polling bias (or mistake):

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Another look - why the polls don't scare me

Intuitively everyone on the right understands that Clinton was crushing president Trump in the polls in 2016 and still lost.  I've been looking at the polls in 2016 by month. After filtering for likely voter polls in the RealClearPolitics polls for September 2016, and comparing those results to the final outcome of the presidential election there is a consistent bias in the results towards Clinton.  Looking state by state you can see the bias in the polling leaning heavily towards Hillary Clinton:

As you can see there were 13 states in September that exhibited a polling bias towards Clinton, two that exhibited no bias and two that exhibited a bias, or error, towards president Trump. Some of the bias was pretty dramatic at this point in the race.

Some of these states had the bias tighten later in the race.  Some did not.  The point is the polls now are either biased or inaccurate compared to what they will like like the day before the election.  One counter-argument could be that the voters' choices changed during that time as well.  Fair enough - there was all of that James Comey garbage of the email investigation back and forth going on.

But if you look back at this point in the race there was a media exuberance that Clinton was going to win 350+ electoral college votes.  Remember this?

Isn't that fun to watch in retrospect?

Even if the pollsters have made adjustments and accounted for 75% of those biases (which is a stretch since there is little evidence that is the case), there's still a swing of a couple of points towards president Trump and that impacts his chances of re-election pretty significantly.

FiveThirtyEight has rated various pollsters as having a bias towards Democrats or Republicans or neither, but that is a more generic bias and understates the bias I have found.  It's possible both biases apply.  Most of the FiveThirtyEight polls seem to have benefited Democrats.  While there is potentially some overlap between their identified biases and my 2016 pollster biases, the overall impact is to Trump's benefit and potentially more than my cautious view of granting pollsters a 75% correction this time around.  The polls don't scare me.

Here's why THEY are wrong

Previously, I explained why I didn't believe my own filtering of the REalClearPolitics (RCP) average of polls and why I am inclined to think president Trump will win, despite the polling evidence.  It's a stretch for me, I know.  I'm an evidence guy.  I'm a data guy.  Yet I don't agree with the evidence I've collected. So in the spirit of self-checking and to dispel any sort of confirmation bias on my part, I thought I'd run an experiment of sorts.  Or rather just do some checking.  I took a look at the RCP polls for 2016 Trump vs. Clinton and compare it to 2020 Trump vs. Biden.  I specifically drilled down on Pennsylvania as a battleground state.  More specifically, I looked at the polls and compared August vs August.  Here's what I found.

The results are remarkably similar in both election years.  Consider - Trump did not lead in either state in either year, in any poll.  But in 2016 Trump defeated  Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania.  Famously so.  If you compare the 6 polls from 2016 to the 6 from 2018, Clinton was ahead of Trump by a combined +42.  Biden is ahead by +33. If you remove the meaningless Registered Voter (RV) polls, Clinton was ahead by +31, Biden only by +26.  In other words, Biden is under-performing Hillary Clinton at the same time period (August) in the election cycle.

Some might argue that pollsters have gotten smarter and are polling better than in 2016.  Show me proof after the election.  Right now there is no evidence to support that claim.  

In fact, when you look at individual pollsters who polled both 2016 and 2018, CBS News/YouGov has Clinton +8, Biden +6.  He's under-performed. Franklin and Marshall had both Clinton and Biden +7.  They've even got a lower margin of error in 2020, so Biden is doing better right?  No, because in 2020 they polled Registered Voters instead of Likely Voters like they did in 2016. Why is that?  Registered Voters always favor Democrats versus Likely Voter polls, and they are always less accurate.  The only pollster in 2020 that has good news for Biden is Emerson.  Emerson has Biden +9 and it only had Clinton +3.  Interestingly in this case, Emerson showed the lowest spread of Clinton over Trump and shows the largest spread of Biden over Trump.  Is it a perennial outlier or the one pollster we can say is an apples-to-apples comparison?  There's no evidence it's the latter without investigating the cross tabs (which I have not yet done).

Evidence, though only circumstantial, would indicate that the pollsters showing a Clinton lead and a Biden lead could be suffering from the same innate bias.  Trump beat Clinton despite the polls (in August anyway), and the same is quite potentially true in 2020.  And Biden is under-performing Clinton at the same point in the race.  The directional indication thus is Trump beat Clinton in Pennsylvania, despite trailing in August.  He trails Biden by less than he trailed Clinton in August.  Therefore it's possible he will defeat Biden by more than he defeated Clinton in Pennsylvania.  That's not an impossible trail of breadcrumbs to follow. 

Now time for the glass half empty view.  In the polls the gap between Trump and Clinton appear to be due to her own ceiling.  Remember, she was not a likable candidate.  Biden, while oafish, is more likable than Hillary was.  Trump's numbers have come up vs. 2016 but Biden has a higher polling average than Hillary did.  It seems he has a higher top end.  The Emerson poll is an interesting example.  Trump scored a 43% in both 2016 and 2020 but whereas Clinton got 46% in the pol, Biden got 52% support.

I eye that even with suspicion.  It is possible that a pollster could (NOT would) hold an option static and then smooth out the results based on that.  In other words, they could have held Trump at 43% and then took the remainder of voters and got fewer not sure/uncommitted and more Biden support.  I don't think they did that.  It's more plausible that Biden is more likable than Hillary was.  That does not translate to more votes in November though.

I'll leave it with one last thought.  The final RCP average in 2016 had Clinton +2.1%, Trump won by 0.7%.  The only two polls that had Trump competitive in the final days of early November were Trafalgar Group (Trump +1) and Harper (Tie).  Most of the pollsters (excluding the RV polls) had Clinton +2.  Morning Call had Clinton +6.  Monmouth had Clinton +4.  Not included in the RCP average but still final week polls, were CNN (Clinton +5), Quinnipiac (Clinton +6) and Franklin and Marshall (Clinton +11).  Remember: The only poll that matters is election day (plus all the monitored mail in voting but that's a story for another day).

Wait, the FBI collaborated with the Clinton campaign?

We know the Clinton campaign was crooked.  We know the FBI was corrupt.  So as surprising as these revelations are, why should we be surprised? Nevertheless these new findings are shocking.

Clinton Chappaqua House Fire

The Clintons' Chappaqua home has caught fire.  The blaze is under control, but there is no word yet on whether any indictable documentation was mysteriously lost in the fire.

UPDATE: It's being reported that it was not the Clintons' home that was affected but a building on their property.

Liberals, Democrats Can't Stop Slipping Further Away from Religious Voters

As The Atlantic frets over the Democrats' hold on religious voters, more and more Democrats and establishment liberals continue to be accused of sexual harassment by the day. While liberals used to hold Republicans and conservatives to the highest possible standards, it seems under the surface they themselves have been not quite as pure as the wind-driven snow. The double standard is now openly on display as there are vast swaths of the liberal establishment that are disquietingly quiet about it all.

As a refresher, her's a list which is undoubtedly incomplete (Conyers and Franken already aren't mentioned, for example, nor are the likes of Kevin Spacey):

Granted, there are also a lot of duplicitous liberals who suddenly are aghast at Bill Clinton's sexual foibles decades ago. It's mere opportunism.

If The Atlantic is expecting to somehow for liberals' to continue their hold on religious voters, the timing of the article is either curious or stupid.  Yes there's unproven and denied allegations re: Roy Moore in Alabama and CNN is dutifully trying to remind us all of Trump's comments (not actual inappropriate touching or advances on women) as if that rises to the same level as groping.

But the other 90+% of the allegations are all against liberals.  That's not going to help The Atlantic's recommendation to sway back religious voters. Voters cannot be so easily fooled by the mainstream media any longer.  President Trump's election has proven that.

It will be interesting to see if there is a liberal Democrat implosion or a civil war within the Democratic party as a result of all of these things coming to light. It might. 

For Bush, family>country>politics

No political capital left, so buh-bye.

Via Hot Air, former president Bush finding his voice to criticize Trump is now real;

In 2009, less than two months after Obama was sworn in, Dubya had this to say about criticizing the new president:

“I’m not going to spend my time criticizing him. There are plenty of critics in the arena,” Bush said. “He deserves my silence.”…

“I love my country a lot more than I love politics,” Bush said. “I think it is essential that he be helped in office.”

Four years later he was still true to his word. Now he’s crapping on Trump. As a certain losing presidential nominee might say, what happened? It can’t be tactical.

Allahpundit goes on to speculate that it's personal.  It is. Bush cannot apply one standard to Obama and another to Trump without his motivation being questioned.  If what he says about country being greater than politics is true, then by extension, he should not criticize president Trump either.  But he has.  That means there has to be something greater than country.  That would be family.  Then-candidate Trump was pretty harsh on Jeb Bush, and he's family.

The Bushes seem as incapable of any level of self-reflection; Jeb Bush regardless of Trump, was not going to win the Republican nomination for president.  Even if he did he would have lost to Hillary Clinton.  Putting Clinton ahead of Trump from the perspective of most Republicans is not putting country first.  A Clinton presidency would have been the final nail in the coffin of America's future.  Either they're ignorant of that fact or clearly the Bush's took Jeb Bush's loss personally. 

For a family that prides itself on putting service to country first, this is a bad reflection on that image.

Timing of indictments is suspect

After Hillary Clinton's worst week since losing the presidential election last year, isn't it a bit curious that suddenly there are suddenly charges going to be laid against someone in the Mueller collusion anything-we-can-dig-up investigation of the White House? And it wasn't really a good week for former president Obama either as his White House has been implicated in the Democrat-Russia collusion scandal now too.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is facing a fresh round of calls from conservative critics for his resignation from the Russia collusion probe, amid revelations that have called into question the FBI’s own actions and potentially Mueller’s independence.

This week’s bombshell that a controversial anti-Trump dossier was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign has Republicans asking to what extent the FBI – which received some of the findings and briefly agreed to pay the same researcher to gather intelligence on Trump and Russia – used the politically connected material.

Hill investigators also are looking into a Russian firm’s uranium deal that was approved by the Obama administration in 2010 despite reports that the FBI – then led by Mueller – had evidence of bribery involving a subsidiary of that firm.

Previously I suggested Muller was doing this in self defense, but now I'm wondering if maybe he's being told or pressured to hurry up in order to shift the focus of the media off of the unfolding Democrat scandal.  The timing is suspect to say the least.

Russia Collusion: Clinton-Obama style

A report in The Hill reveals that there was collusion with Russia, and there was a cover-up.  It's just that the perpetrators were not anyone on team Trump:

An American businessman who worked for years undercover as an FBI confidential witness was blocked by the Obama Justice Department from telling Congress about conversations and transactions he witnessed related to the Russian nuclear industry's efforts to win favor with Bill and Hillary Clinton and influence Obama administration decisions, his lawyer tells The Hill.

Attorney Victoria Toensing, a former Reagan Justice Department official and former chief counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday she is working with members of Congress to see if they can get the Trump Justice Department or the FBI to free her client to talk to lawmakers.

“All of the information about this corruption has not come out,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “And so my client, the same part of my client that made him go into the FBI in the first place, says, 'This is wrong. What should I do about it?'”

Except it's not front page news anywhere. It's not plastered all over CNN as a major, major scandal because of who it is that's involved. Now they may complain that these are unsubstantiated claims, but that has never stopped anyone from doing that to president Trump.

This is a big deal and the Justice Department needs to let this come out, truthful or not, to establish what actually happened.

The game is so much easier when you play by the same rules as the Left, it really is.

So what if Trump colluded with Russia?

I am not suggesting in any way that Trump did collude with Russia.  I don't believe he did because ZERO evidence has been brought forward. I am merely engaging in a thought exercise here.  

Let's suppose for a moment that the left's bizzaro fantasy of Trump and Russia collusion to steal the 2016 presidential election from the rightful victor Hillary Clinton is actually correct.  Start by granting that Russia is once again the worst thing to ever happen to America.  Grant the far-fetched fact that Putin et. al. colluded with the Trump team and leveraged WikiLeaks to paint Hillary Clinton in a bad light.  Skip the point that Hillary Clinton was actually keeping and sharing state secrets on a  private email server in clear violation of national security policy, and instead assume that people didn't care about that. Ignore the fact that a majority of voters had negative opinions of both candidates. Ignore the fact that voters are partisan and that then-candidate Trump had an unorthodox campaign strategy, which allowed him to win in states that Hillary Clinton herself took for granted.  Assume further that the candidate who wanted to tax the middle class (and if it was just a slip of the tongue, it was never corrected) and put coal workers out of work and who kept a rope between herself and the press and who collapsed into a van on the campaign trail and whose Clinton Global Initiative wasn't under scrutiny for accounting malfeasance. Overlook the fact that the Democratic National Committee cheated for her and so did the media.  Gloss over all of that, and you are left with a Trump win because Russia helped him.

So what?

The media is portraying Donald Trump as a Putin patsy who will do the bidding of the Russian autocrat.  But what if the guy who wants to Make America Great Again was using Putin as a patsy?  What if he leveraged help from Russia to defeat an opponent who had help from everybody else, including a sitting president and a Department of Justice turning two blind eyes to everything Clinton, and now that he's president he's cast aside anything to do with any deal with Russia.  What if Trump cleverly used Russia as the useful idiots?

Is it possible that the smart businessman, used smart business to get what he needed and then cast aside his promise to Russia?  This is the same guy liberals went after for doing just that in his Trump University civil suit.  

Yes but...

The same people who say Trump is capable of such Machiavellian business practices, believe he could not think to do it with Russia. Wrong.  If he did use Russia, it's hard to see why Russia would have been so stupid as to work with candidate Trump.  He wants to increase and reinvigorate American military strength on a massive scale.  It's hard to see any upside for Russia in that.  He wants American allies to increase their own share of the NATO bill.  He's never actually said quit NATO, he's said it needs to work for America.  Either other defense partners pay their share or maybe pay America to carry their share of the load.  A stronger NATO does not serve Russian interests.  A defeated ISIS might help Russia in Syria but in the broader picture, removing that thorn from America's side certainly helps America more than it does Russia.  A stronger bond between Israel and America is a win for both of those two countries, not so much for Russia, who cannot leverage Middle Eastern antipathy towards Israel into alliances but only an opportunity to sink funding into groups who have a common geo-political enemy.  A stronger American economy? A tougher stance against Chinese currency manipulation and job offshoring of American jobs at the expense of long term American economic sustainability leading to a slow national economic suicide of America do not seem to be in the best interest of a nation Democrats are portraying as the worst national security threat since the 1980's.

Do you see my point?   What in Trump's promises and actions to date for that matter, look pro-Russia?

The argument on the left about president Trump and his team are fabricated out of nothing other than a panicked desire to derail his presidency, because at the end of the day, the argument makes no sense.  It falls down on it's premise.  Russia has no real benefit from a Trump presidency but it certainly would have benefitted from a Clinton presidency. That's because the Clintons will do anything for their own economic benefit, even if means selling out America. The argument depends on its own existence to justify itself, like some weird paradox.  That's why it falls apart so easily.

All that aside, yes, there would be an issue about collusion with outsiders.  But turn the spotlight on Hillary Clinton and her nefarious donations from countries like Saudi Arabia if you want to go down that path.  If all the details come to light Democrats would fare far worse under the scrutiny than would president Trump. 

Trump trumped on immigration (for now)

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled against president Trump's immigration executive order.  Did you know that president Obama and president Clinton both called for an illegal immigrant ban too?

And so did Trump. Here's why:

But yet another court has called Trump's temporary ban unlawful. National security is not unlawful. But president Trump is not one to take things lying down and he responded as forcefully as you'd hope (or merely expect, if you're a progressive liberal).

SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2017

This is not over by far.

Leaked: Clinton premature celebration on election night

Election night.  Back when the Clintons thought they had won the election: [Update: video was removed, another version has been added below.]

Excuse me for enjoying it, that's not very nice. Nevertheless, it's difficult to not have the same level of glee that Hillary Clinton lost.

Added:

Here's a disturbing thought...

Should Trump pull off a victory tonight, does Clinton challenge the validity of the of the results using Trump's unwillingness to accept the results if he lost, as her justification?

Election projection 2016. It's a headscratcher.

I honestly don't know what to think at this point. There's plenty of evidence that Hillary Clinton will break 300 electoral college votes.  There's significant evidence that she won't make 270.  Polls show Hillary up by 2% to 3%  on average. But the polls missed Reagan's landslide in 1980.  The polls missed Brexit in 2016. Then again, polls underestimated Obama's defeat of Romney in 2012. Is Trump surging or is his Democrat swing state tour this last week just bravado or desperation? Who knows?  I certainly don't, although it won't stop me best guessing.

Skipping all the boring stuff, I'll leap straight to my prognostications.  Trump will beat Hillary 270 to 268. Clinton will try to litigate it but will fail. The Republicans will keep the House and end up with 51 seats in the Senate.  That's me trying to split the difference between cautious optimism, Trump hysteria and polling and pundit commonality suggesting Hillary wins.  This is really a true unknown situation in my eyes.  I think the most telling insights will come from post-election analysis of polling data.

A few observations I can offer.  

There may be what's been dubbed a Trump Monster Vote, but the size is still TBD. I doubt it will be as big as many hoped for but bigger than expected.  I expect the real difference maker in this election will not be Democrat cross-over voters but rather dampened Clinton support and the lack of enthusiasm among Hillary supporters.   If turnout for Hillary is low then Trump's odds improve dramatically as his supporters clearly have an enthusiasm edge. 

The transit strike in Philadelphia has ended, which is likely good news for Hillary GOTV in Philadelphia.

Hillary may also have abandoned Ohio and could be looking to fortify Pennsylvania.  That's also helpful for her strategically even though to some, it might appear as a panic move.

Pennsylvania may be the state to swing the election.  But so too might be New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Michigan or even the single electoral vote from Maine CD2, if Trump is to prevail. If Clinton emerges victorious then the state that will do it for her is either Florida or North Carolina.