Biden Fades at the End While Trump Gets Stronger

President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden square off during the first presidential debate at the Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, on Sept. 29, 2020. (Jim Watson, Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

The last week of the 2020 presidential race just began and one of the candidates seems to have disappeared from the campaign trail.

The stark contrast between the campaigns has never been more evident than it is during this final week.

Joe Biden has no campaign events on the trail scheduled for this last week and is limiting his public appearances to friendly media interviews and “virtual rally” livestreams. This is while President Donald J. Trump is holding as many as three rallies a day in multiple states.

It’s simply unprecedented for a candidate for the White House to severely limit their campaign appearances over the final month, but this is what Biden is doing. Recall he declared a four-day lid before the last presidential debate. Team Biden had also called early lids for 12 days in September, almost half the month.

Political strategists using conventional wisdom—as if anything about this 2020 was race was conventional—would say that a candidate with such a big lead in the media polls is making the smart play by mostly staying away from the fray, limiting exposure to any last minute mistakes that could change the race.

It’s true that almost every single major pollster gives Biden a commanding lead at this point. As I write this only Rasmussen Reports gives Trump a lead over Biden by a single point.

The problem here is that the polls giving Biden these commanding leads are highly questionable.

The contrast between the massive public support for Trump at numerous events while Biden manages to draw only a handful of people is hard to square with poll numbers claiming Biden has a building wave of national support behind him.

If the Media’s Polls Are Wrong Again…

It must be remembered that many of these same polling organizations got the 2016 results massively wrong. And it seems that instead of learning from the mistakes of having missed Clinton’s defeat at Trump’s hands so very badly, the media doubled down on the same errors.

In a recent interview, prominent pollster Frank Luntz stated that while the mainstream polling outfits could survive the epic misfire of 2016, getting the 2020 race wrong also would spell the end of the national polling industry.

“I hate to acknowledge it, because that’s my industry—at least partially—but the public will have no faith. No confidence. Right now, the biggest issue is the trust deficit,” Luntz told Fox News’ Bret Baier. “Pollsters did not do a good job in 2016. So, if Donald Trump surprises people, if Joe Biden had a 5- or 6-point lead, my profession is done.”

Luntz continued by saying, “If the numbers turn out to be wrong, if Donald Trump is right and these pollsters are wrong about this race, then people like me are going to have to find a new profession.”

As the election season has gone on, the “DNC Media Complex” does seem to have done what I predicted in March: set itself up to fail at an impossible task.

While endeavoring to hide and ignore all the signs of the president building national support, corporate media outlets used slanted news reports and fake polling to try to manufacture a fake wave of building popular support behind someone who may be one of the most corrupt politicians to ever hold public office.

While the mainstream media has done it’s best to drag the fading Biden over the finish line, the candidate’s own lackluster campaigning with early lids being called more and more frequently has made the media’s job that much harder.

The election itself will render the verdict on the success of this media strategy. I don’t think it worked, but we’ll see.

Even Limited Appearances Aren’t Helping Biden

While Biden is doing his best to limit his public appearances, it’s not helping all that much. On Sunday during a virtual campaign event, Joe suffered a senior moment where he visibly struggled to remember who he was running against.

Joe Biden: “What kind of country are we going to be? Four more years of ... of George ... George ... ah ...”

Jill Biden: [quietly] “Trump …”

Joe Biden: “We’re going to find ourselves where, if Trump gets elected, we’re going to be in a different world.”

What terribly sad spectacle. And Democrats have only themselves to blame for it.

In the end, the Biden campaign was never quite all that real. The longer the race went on, the more lackluster and lethargic the Biden team became.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author. As a nonpartisan public charity, The Epoch Times does not endorse these statements and takes no position on political candidates.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.