Erick Erickson is, for a voter shepherd, analyzing a bit too deeply:
The reality is pretty simple. Based on the fundamentals, Donald Trump should win. But based on emotions, Harris should win.
The fundamentals are that this election comes as the incumbent White House party has wrecked the American economy. The press claims we’re doing better than every other country, which is true, but the reality is voters vote on microeconomic issues and not macroeconomic issues. At the microeconomic level, prices are still too high and not offset enough by growth in wages. Gas is higher than when Trump left office. The border is less secure and American communities are overflowing with illegal aliens. International gang activity in the heartland is on the rise. Abroad, we are less stable and less secure. The Chinese have hacked into our internet service providers and have access to our data. The Biden Administration does not know how to stop them from that access. Iran is on the verge of more strikes against Israel. Americans are still being held hostage by Hamas.
Notice how he admits that, world-wide, America is doing quite well, which indicates Democratic economic plans have been successful, as I have bolded. But as a right wing radio host who, from his blog posts, has been tasked with holding his conservative audience together and have them vote for Republicans, Erickson’s admission is foolishness.
I’ve noticed the right wingers have been quietly backfilling behind Mr Trump, which is to say, they’ve been trying to build a degree of separation between Mr Trump and right-wing ideology. For example, Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) pronounced thusly not long ago:
“President Trump can win this election. His policies are good for America, and if you have a policy debate for president, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election,” Graham told Welker.
“I’m looking for President Trump to show up in the last 80 days to define what he will do for our country, to fix broken borders, to lower inflation,” Graham added. [NBC News]
Republicans continue to stomp their feet on economics, noisily proclaiming the excellence of their policies, while, as we’ve already noted with Mr Erickson, they assert the economy, as managed by the Democrats, is a flaming wreck – ignoring a superb unemployed rate, return of manufacturing, etc etc, along with the concrete evidence of poor economic performance under Republican administrations – the arch-example being, I think, the Great Recession under President Bush. Under President Biden, yes, inflation was a problem, but, first, cleaning up after the Trump Administration is an expensive business, and, second, it’s come back down to normal.
There are certainly some truths in portions of his message. The social policies of the Democrats have exhibited an arrogance that nearly approaches the Republicans’ arrogance on the same matters, which is to say their shared certainty of the rightness of their solutions in a complex, difficult world exacerbates already difficult problems, and irritates people who feel they should be participating in debating and solving them. There are evident problems on the left and the right.
In the end, though, the real problem with Erickson’s analysis is his complete omission of Dobbs, i.e., abortion. Without Dobbs, we’d be facing a tight race and even a second term for Mr. Trump. But the fourth-raters that make up most all of the Republican Party these days more or less guaranteed Dobbs – and the disaster that appears to have followed them home.
