The Polls After the Party “Conventions” and Before Labor Day

by Ray Keating

The Keating Files – September 4, 2020

The quasi-virtual Democratic and Republican conventions are behind us (thank you, Lord) and Labor Day is upon us. So, where does the 2020 presidential race stand at this point in time?

As for the less-than-titanic struggle between the eloquence-challenged major party candidates for president – that is, President Donald Trump (R) and former Vice President Joe Biden (D) – Biden continues to hold a solid lead in the national polls, while matters get a bit more “interesting” when breaking the race down by state.

It’s clear that Trump received no convention bump after GOP finished up their gathering with Trump’s speech on August 27 before a maskless Republican Party. Looking at all of the national polls taken after the last day of the GOP convention, Biden’s lead ranges from anywhere from 5 percentage point to 11 points. 

It’s also stunning that nearly all of these polls show Biden polling in the low 50s and Trump in the low 40s. If the election were held today (which it obviously is not), this would mean a big win for Biden in terms of the national popular vote. In fact, one could make the case that Democrat Biden got a bump coming out of the Republican convention.

But let’s look at the battleground states.

Arizona (11 electoral votes) has moved in Biden’s direction in a major way, with the latest polls putting him up by 9-10 percentage points.

Florida (29 electoral votes) ranks as a toss-up, with one post-convention poll putting Trump up by three points, and the other putting Biden up by three points. However, the Quinnipiac poll, which has Biden up by three, tends to be more reliable that the Trafalgar poll with Trump up by three.

Michigan (16 electoral votes) still leans to Biden. Trump has consistently trailed Biden, and the two post-convention polls show Biden up by 4 to 10 points.

Minnesota (10 electoral votes) still offers Trump some hope, as the race appears closer than anticipated. However, Biden continues to hold a small lead in the latest state polls.

North Carolina (15 electoral votes) is a dead heat. Among post-convention polls, two have Biden up by four points, and the other has Trump up by two.

Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) remains a challenge for President Trump, but the race clearly has tightened. The post-convention polls show the Pennsylvania contest ranging from even to Biden up by eight points.

Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) has been and remains looking strong for Biden, with the post-convention polls showing him having an eight percentage point lead.

Ohio (18 electoral votes) has not served up any polls clear of the convention. However, based on the polls we do have, Trump seems to have a very narrow lead. 

Iowa (6 electoral votes) has not offered any recent polls. The latest surveys from late July/early August indicate a dead heat.

Georgia (16 electoral votes) has one poll clear of the convention, and it shows Trump up by seven points. That’s where one might expect this long-GOP state to be, but assorted previous polls showed the race very close. Georgia certainly warrants watching.

Nevada (6 electoral votes) has been sparse on polling, but the latest poll (in the field from August 20-30) put Biden up by four points (i.e., within the margin of error).

Texas (38 electoral votes) should be Republican country, but it has loomed as a battleground in this election. There are no polls clear of the convention. But the latest surveys from the latter half of August have the race a dead heat – one poll with Trump up by a point and one with Biden up by a point. If you need an example of how crazy politics are today, just consider Texas being a battleground state.

Keep in mind that everything had to break Donald Trump’s way to get elected in 2016, with him taking took the Electoral College 306-232 (though the final tally of actual votes was 304-227). In order to win the presidency, 270 electoral votes are needed. 

This year, it appears the Trump is at least competitive in two states won by Hillary Clinton in 2016 – Minnesota and Nevada. 

At the same time, Biden is showing real strength in at least four states that Trump won in 2016 – Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Plus, there are effective dead heats in five other states that went for Trump in 2016. 

This tallies up to a formidable challenge for President Trump to be re-elected. Indeed, if the election were held today, a conservative estimate would have Biden winning the White House with 310 to 339 electoral votes.

Of course, even in a presidential election with so many voters’ views seemingly hardened in place, anything can happen over the coming two months. And in the end, the story will be told by who actually votes.

An aging, inarticulate populist versus an aging, inarticulate leftist hardly makes for an encouraging election, but I guess it could at least be entertaining?

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Ray Keating is a columnist, novelist, economist, podcaster and entrepreneur.  You can order his new book Behind Enemy Lines: Conservative Communiques from Left-Wing New York  from Amazon or signed books  at RayKeatingOnline.com. His other recent nonfiction book is Free Trade Rocks! 10 Points on International Trade Everyone Should Know. The views expressed here are his own – after all, no one else should be held responsible for this stuff, right?

Keating’s latest novel is  The Traitor: A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel, which is the 12thbook in the series. The best way to fully enjoy Ray Keating’s Pastor Stephen Grant thrillers and mysteries is to join the Pastor Stephen Grant Fellowship! For the BEST VALUE, consider the Book of the Month Club.  Check it all out at

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State of Liberalism in 2020: Still Advancing, Still Incoherent

by Ray Keating

The Keating Files – March 27, 2020

What is it about liberalism (that is, modern-day, not classical, liberalism) that it continues to advance on the policy front, even though it’s intellectually incoherent?

I asked pretty much the same question when I wrote an assessment of liberalism twenty years ago. At that time, I pointed out that most liberal thinkers – whether in academia, or penning essays – chose to ignore serious inquiry in favor of shilling for Democrats and appealing almost purely to emotion.

That wasn’t always the case, but it’s hard to seriously argue otherwise in terms of where liberalism stands today. 

Think about it for just a moment. What serves as the foundation for many prominent positions widely accepted on the Left, such as partial-birth abortion; Supreme Court justices free to redefine the U.S. Constitution as they see fit; ever-expansive government without concern about how higher taxes, for example, might affect the economy; the growing acceptance of and advocacy for socialism even though it is undermined by economic common sense and history; treating government regulation as costless; blind acceptance of nearly everything served up by environmental activists; opposition to free trade; buttressing the spread of group victimhood with little regard for personal responsibility; participating in a naïve revision of history whereby anyone or any entity in the past that undertook anything that isn’t seen as pure in terms of 2020 left-wing preferences must be entirely condemned (with apologies and compensation sought out, somehow); perpetuating Marxist drivel regarding workers being exploited by and pitted against business owners; establishing a belief system, to the extent it might exist, that transforms Christianity, for example, into nothing more than a vehicle for “social justice;” and supplanting exploration of right, wrong and truth with a lazy relativism?

There really are four possible answers that I can think of in terms of what undergirds this shallow hodge-podge. The first is that true liberal thinkers have become nearly extinct; replaced by left-wing writers, professors and think tanks that simply take their cues from the special interests that dominate the Democratic Party, such as environmentalists, radical feminists, and so on. Political talking points have replaced thoughtful analysis.

The second possibility is that liberal “thinkers” have become far more radicalized, but continue to serve as the intellectual foundation, such as it is, of the Democratic Party. 

Third, this kind of liberalism is rooted in feelings and emotions, rather than serious thought and reflection, and therefore, fits our times quite neatly. Indeed, this seems to me to be the most powerful factor in play in terms of the current state of liberalism. While liberalism has been moving down this feelings/emotions track for quite some time – in fact, for decades – it has reached a level that it now almost completely dominates the Left.

There’s also the question of how much liberalism led to the spread of a feelings-over-thinking culture, and/or how such a culture impacted liberalism.

Either way, liberals have moved from trying to think through ideas, philosophies and policies in a quest for the best answer or (dare I write it?) the truth (albeit, though, often coming up with the wrong answers), to trying to formulate arguments that support an increasing preference for feelings over truth, thinking and analysis.

Liberalism today boils down to asking: How do you feel about this or that? And then liberal professors, thinkers and writers work to dress up or legitimize those feelings for more “intellectual” consumption. Those feelings also are or become a political movement that often finds a home in the Democratic Party, and is manifested in people like President Barack Obama and all of the Democratic presidential contenders who were in the 2020 race.

Coherent? No. Politically effective? It’s hard to argue with in terms of the results.

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Ray Keating is a columnist, an economist, a novelist (his latest novels are The Traitor: A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel, which is the 12^thbook in the series, and the second edition of Root of All Evil? A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel with a new Author Introduction), a nonfiction author (among his recent works is Free Trade Rocks! 10 Points on International Trade Everyone Should Know), a podcaster, and an entrepreneur. You can also order his forthcoming book Behind Enemy Lines: Conservative Communiques from Left-Wing New York– signed booksor for the Kindle. The views expressed here are his own.

The State of the Democrats in 2020: The Journey Left Accelerates

by Ray Keating

The Keating Files – March 19, 2020

Where do our major political parties and philosophies stand right now, and as we look ahead not just to presidential and congressional elections this November but beyond?

Just after the 2000 election, when we were all waiting around for the final tally of a disputed presidential election – remember Bush vs. Gore – I took the opportunity to evaluate the state of our two major political parties, and the major movements or sets of ideas that undergirded much of the nation’s politics, i.e., conservatism and modern-day liberalism. It was one of those turn-of-the-century opportunities. 

And now, two decades later (wow – 20 years!?), how do things look for the Democrats, the Republicans, liberalism and conservatism? This first essay evaluates the Democrats.

In 2000, I bemoaned that the state of our body politic had “wilted.” I argued that “the size of government combined with the corruption of the Democratic Party during the reign of President Bill Clinton ... soiled the public square,” including “the continuing tragic ethical decline of the Democratic Party.” The Dems had “tacitly adopted the sordid governing philosophy of the ends justifying the means.” That’s still the case, but things have gotten worse.

But the mess back then wasn’t just about Clinton. It had been building up as the Democrats, for example, had enshrined judicial activism as a glorious cause, that is, in order to get around what was actually – and for them inconveniently – written and intended by the U.S. Constitution. Democrats also perfected the political spin machine that could manufacture crises in order to advance the policies they preferred, namely, the expansion of government into all realms of life – the dream of Progressives in the Democratic Party since Woodrow Wilson. Again, the ends justify the means (more on this, by the way, for the Republicans in the upcoming essay on the GOP).

Little of this has changed over the past 20 years, except that the Democrats’ policy agenda has moved much further to the Left. For example, any semblance of social conservatism that might have existed among Democrats in 2000 – such as a few pro-life elected officials here and there – has been stomped out. 

And while Democrats in 2000 were annoyed at being called “socialists,” today, a significant chunk of the party, led by presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, as well as U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC, embrace the label – thereby exhibiting a breathtaking expansion of economic ignorance within the party. Indeed, as bad as the Democrats had been on economic issues post-John F. Kennedy, the steep descent into economic illiteracy has been rather stunning in recent times.

The notion that the U.S. could have a Democratic president today who would agree to a capital gains tax cut, welfare reform, and making NAFTA a reality – as President Bill Clinton did – is nearly unimaginable. In fact, could 1992, 1996 or 2000 Bill Clinton even have a shot at the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination today? Doubtful.

For good measure, the radical environmental movement’s reach has vastly expanded in the Democratic Party to the point that a climate agenda imposing drastic costs on the U.S. economy and calling for government to effectively reshape the entire energy industry has become the accepted political line among Democrats.

In looking at causes, one must recognize that Barack Obama ran and governed as the most liberal president the nation has ever had, given that his Leftism cut across nearly all issues, as opposed to someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who also was a hardline Leftist but had issues where he was still rather centrist, like on foreign affairs, and other social issues around today that weren’t even thought of by most people.

So, this year, we have Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, pitching himself as the more moderate among Democratic presidential candidates – and given that Sanders is the only one remaining, Biden is more moderate – but at the same time, Biden arguably is running to the left of Obama.

The Democratic Party over the past twenty years has moved so far to the Left – that is, it has become so radicalized – that the party’s 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, managed to lose to Donald Trump (and yes, she also was highly unlikeable, but so was Trump), and the same thing could happen in 2020. 

Looking ahead, can the Democrats pull back from this journey to the far Left? Well, keep in mind that this is the direction the party has been going at least since 1968, and given who the party’s activists and donors are, it’s hard to imagine a return to anything even close to where the party was under John F. Kennedy, or even Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. For example, recall that the deregulatory movement that benefited the U.S. economy so enormously during Ronald Reagan’s 1980s actually got started during Carter’s presidency. But especially given the hyper-regulation of the Obama years, any whiff of talk that doesn’t involve increased regulation is sure to lead to banishment from the 21^stcentury Democrats. 

Indeed, even as the Democrats seem to have coalesced this year around Biden, and moved away from Sanders, in an effort to defeat Trump, it has been the uniqueness of Donald Trump that drove this momentary glimpse of something resembling political sanity (as well as more people actually paying attention to crazy stuff that Sanders has done and said over the years). But as already noted, it’s not like Biden is running on anything close to being middle of the road. He offers a left-wing agenda – such as big tax increases, unbridled liberalism on all social issues, more and more regulation, extremism on the environment, and so on – in the hopes that his history and style as trusty, old Uncle Joe will attract, and fool, enough voters to send Trump packing. 

This Biden strategy in no way challenges the Democrats’ increasing liberalism. Indeed, barring some political miracle, the Democrats’ leftward journey will continue unabated for the foreseeable future.

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Ray Keating is a columnist, an economist, a novelist (his latest novels are The Traitor: A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel, which is the 12^thbook in the series, and the second edition of Root of All Evil? A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel with a new Author Introduction), a nonfiction author (among his recent works is Free Trade Rocks! 10 Points on International Trade Everyone Should Know), a podcaster, and an entrepreneur. You can also order his forthcoming book Behind Enemy Lines: Conservative Communiques from Left-Wing New York – signed booksor for the Kindle. The views expressed here are his own.