Miranda Devine: Pop superstar Lady Gaga appears with Joe Biden at rally
Lady Gaga came out to support Joe Biden on election eve in Pennsylvania, but the anti-fracking activist should have taken more notice of his policies, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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How many politicians in the world have huge crowds chanting “We love you”? This spontaneous outpouring of affection for President Donald Trump has become a striking feature at his rallies in the waning days of the election campaign.
It is a pity Trump-haters don’t have enough humility to try to understand why.
Instead they double down on their relentless barrage of insults against the President and his supporters.
Joe Biden has called Trump supporters “chumps” and “ugly folk”, the equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”. So much for his pledge to be a president who unites the country. Instead, Biden turned up at one of his final rallies in the company of pop star (and anti-fracking activist) Lady Gaga.
But, as the wheels fall off Biden’s campaign, polls in battleground states tighten and the Democrats’ lead in early voting shrinks, the 2020 election is shaping up to be a repeat of 2016, on steroids.
This time, the deplorables see their vote as two middle fingers and a forearm jerk to a corrupt political establishment, the “Fake News” media, censorious Big Tech, Hollywood, and the authoritarian “expert class” who have combined to try to end Trump’s presidency and disenfranchise his voters.
The more the establishment attacks Trump, the more passionately his voters love him.
His COVID-inspired outdoor airport rallies now are the stuff of legend. In the last three days Trump has flown to seven states for 14 rallies packed with tens of thousands of Americans, having fun and enjoying the camaraderie of like-minded people.
They laugh out loud at Trump’s Borscht Belt humour, his banter, his sleepy Joe jokes, the catchphrases, heels, divas and baby-faces, straight out of the WWE playbook.
“Four More years!” they chant. “Lock him up.” “USA! USA!”
“We Love You” is a recent addition which has become a crowd staple, since Trump survived his bout of COVID-19 last month.
They chanted it at his Michigan rally on Sunday, one of five that day, as he spoke outdoors in a thin coat for an hour amid snow flurries.
“I’m telling you, you’re going to make me cry with that. Stop …” he told the crowd.
So, if the enthusiasm at Trump’s rallies is any indication of his turnout at the polls today, he’ll win in a landslide.
In a press call yesterday the Trump campaign shared raw voter data claiming they have the edge in battleground states and will comfortably win the electoral college vote.
In the crucial state of Pennsylvania their projections show Trump with an Election Day advantage of one million votes.
“A great red wave is forming,” Trump said on Saturday at one of five rallies in Pennsylvania.
“And there’s not a thing they can do about it.”
Sure enough, there are signs the Democrats are in panic mode.
Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, in a Zoom call with reporters yesterday, admitted the race was closer than they had expected, and said the president was only one state short of winning the election.
But then she made the astonishingly irresponsible statement that Biden would not concede on election night, no matter what: “Under no scenario will Donald Trump be declared a victor on election night.”
Trump deputy campaign manager Justin Clark responded by accusing Democrats of trying to “delegitimise Election Day results [and badge] the president’s election success as a red mirage. “The last gasp of the Biden campaign will be ugly. It will be bitter. It will be nasty and it will be ruthless,” Clark said.
Democrats would try to drag out the election vote counting, he said.
“The only way they can get Joe Biden to win at this point is to subvert the will of the voters by trying to do an end run around election laws with respect to late-arriving ballots.”
Harsh rhetoric, but Pennsylvania’s Democratic Attorney-General Josh Shapiro confirmed the concerns yesterday when he declared that Biden has already won the state in early voting and promised litigation to stop Trump prevailing on Election Day.
Real potential for fraud exists after Shapiro won a Pennsylvania Supreme Court bid this week to allow mail-in ballots to be received up to three days after the election, even if there is no legible postmark.
Both campaigns have amassed an army of lawyers to litigate election results, which could take weeks in a close contest, with the uncertainty only fuelling riots.
Of course, if Trump wins by the margins his campaign is projecting, no dirty tricks will be enough to deny him victory.
Trump’s director of battleground strategy Nick Trainer points to a “red wave” of Trump voters turning out on Election Day.
The Biden campaign has fanned COVID fears among their supporters about voting in person, and urged them to vote by mail, while most Republican voters plan to vote on Election Day.
In Pennsylvania, President Trump’s Election Day margin needs to be big, and it will be, Trainer says.
“We currently project he’ll win the Election Day vote by over one million votes,” he says.
Those numbers break down to a Democrat lead in early voting of about 750,000 votes in the state, with Trump getting 2.6 million votes on Election Day and Biden getting 1.5 million.
So Trump’s net advantage would be about 350,000, better than the 44,000 margin he won by in 2016.
In other battleground states, Trainer says the Democrats’ early advantage in absentee ballots will be swamped by a large turnout by Republican voters on Election Day.
In Florida he projects: “President Trump has an Election Day margin of over 500,000 net ballots.”
In North Carolina, Michigan and Ohio a projected Election Day margin is over 400,000 votes.
In Arizona it’s 150,000 votes.
In Wisconsin, it’s 100,000 votes and in Nevada, 50,000.
This optimistic forecast depends on Trump voters turning out in big numbers on the day, of course.
But, if they vote as enthusiastically as they rally, they will deliver four more years for Trump, by a margin so compelling it may be all over, bar the rioting, on election night.
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