Jay Weber Show transcript 3-26-24 7:10am
The great Craig Gilbert has a special to the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel today.
I think he’s retired now, after a very long career as the J/S’ top political reporter, and by my estimation, he always played it fair.
I never detected bias- much less intentional bias- out of Craig Gilbert in all the years he wrote for them. I thought-and still think-that he’s an insightful, disciplined, old school reporter of the sort I wish we’d get back.
Today- gilbert has an analysis piece on the so-called enthusiasm gap in Wisconsin.
This is what you’d think it is: it measures the generic level of enthusiasm that voters have this year....to turn out to vote. How excited are they about their choices? How likely are they to show up?
It's just one measure, but it has proven, over time, to be one of the more important ones.
And so, based on the latest Marquette Poll’s finding, Gilbert says President Biden and the democrats-do- have an enthusiasm problem in Wisconsin this year-
Which explains why Joe Biden stopped here two weeks ago-and why we can’t seem to get rid of Jill Biden and Kammy. They seem to be visiting Milwaukee nearly every week.
As Gilbert writes:
...an obvious political purpose: to mobilize Democrats in a city where turnout could help decide the 2024 election. But the turnout questions for Wisconsin Democrats go beyond Milwaukee this year. A striking enthusiasm gap confronts Biden and his party. We’ve seen it in national polling. And we’re seeing it in Wisconsin, where the enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans reached an all-time high in the Marquette Law School poll earlier this year. In Marquette’s most recent Wisconsin survey, taken at the end of January, 63% of Republican voters said they were “very enthusiastic” about voting for president and other offices this fall. Only 39% of Democrats said so. That is by far the biggest partisan disparity (24 points) ever measured by Marquette, which has asked this question 34 times from 2014 to 2024. It’s not that Republican enthusiasm is high. In fact, it’s a little bit below average, historically, and below where it was four years ago. (The same is true for independent voters).
Yes, everyone is different, and every potential voter is motivated by different things. As gilbert points out: some dems can’t get enthused about Biden-but they sure like to vote against Donald Trump...and so.... what are they telling pollsters now? And does it really reflect whether they will vote in fall?
I’m guessing not. A lot can change over seven months. On either side. Maybe Biden’s frailty gets dramatically worse-in just a short period of time. Maybe Trump gets convicted of something or finally says something that motivates a chunk of voters either way.
Maybe RFK junior surges out of nowhere on a surprise platform that Wi-Fi gives you cancer and fluoride in the water is causing Asperger’s, or whatever nonsense he spouts.
But let’s not pretend that a 20 or 24 point enthusiasm gap isn’t huge.
But let’s not kid ourselves: that high enthusiasm to vote in 2020 wasn’t motivated by Joe Biden being atop the ticket. He was a candidate who couldn’t get 500 people to a campaign event.
Those democrats were excited about voting-against-trump. Well, why aren’t they this year?
Has Biden really been that bad?
Yes, he has-but -but- I’m going to say that this still isn’t about ‘Biden’ so much as it’s about trump.
My prediction would be this enthusiasm gap tightens as we get closer to election day- and as the fickler American voters amongst us start to see more of Donald Trump and hear more about how he’s going to ‘end democracy’ if he gets into office again.
Believe it or not, folks, the Americans will decide most elections aren’t really thinking much about the fall race yet....and the worst of the never-ending trump bashing hasn’t even begun yet.
More democrats will be more motivated to vote against trump again-by fall. No doubt.
However. That’s not to say that there aren’t major differences between now and 2020. In 2020, Joe Biden was running as a moderate ..and to get ‘normalcy back’ after Trump’s first term. How many swing and independent voters are going to fall for that again?
He's been a radical, America-hating train wreck from day one. Joe Biden isn’t a patriot. He’s a patsy. He’s being used by the most extreme, America-hating forces in this country-and abroad-and he doesn’t seem to care -or notice.
All he knows is that they promised he’d be the next FDR if he just ‘went along with it’, and so he did.
This has gotten so bad for the dems that the enthusiasm gap in Wisconsin is among the least of their worries- even if Jill and Kammy won’t leave us alone.
Yesterday- a poll conducted by a black woman’s pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ group found that less than 4 in 10 young black voters say they will bother to vote this fall.
Uh-oh.
So, Biden continues to bleed black voters. And this poll comes after Biden spent part of the week last week- trying to boost the Hispanic vote with a trip to Nevada and Arizona.
Biden won Nevada last time around by about two percent of the vote. Recent polling in Nevada has him ‘down four’ to trump. That’s at-or outside-the margin of error for these polls.
It turns out that the ‘jobs created’ figures for Nevada aren’t anywhere near the state figures are-which isn’t a surprise-given that the Biden regime has been over-inflating their jobs numbers every month for three years-and then quietly going back and lowering them when no one’s looking.
So-the number of jobs created under Biden in Nevada-isn’t anywhere near what Biden claims-and state officials out there know it.
Bottom line: Nevadans- Hispanic, white, and other-aren’t experiencing this economic boom that Biden and the democrats insist they should be feeling.
It’s the same story ‘out there’ as it is around the entire country: Bidenomics has destroyed America’s family finances. Is still driving up prices. Has destroyed most people’s ability to risk buying a new house or a new car-even if they desperately need one...
Of course, Nevadans have a growing hatred for Biden. They have reason to.
Folks- Joe Biden should not have to be fighting for the Latino vote in Nevada. He won it by 19 points in 2020-
He got 56 percent of the Latino vote to trump’s 37 percent. This shouldn’t need to be a stop he makes as he tries to boost his supporters in 2024.
But it is. Because he’s been such a calamitous, catastrophically bad president.
There’s a reason that the Biden era will be remembered as the moment when the ‘great separation’ began: the era in which more reasonable independent and conservative minded Americans divorced themselves from the blue states and from the Biden agenda as much as they could.
Joe Biden’s own census department says that nearly four million Americans fled the blue states for the red states over the Biden era.
There are other factors, yes. The left will try to blame covid- and the switch to more working from home-but that’s only a small part of it-
Because even most of the people who made that choice-did largely due to wanting to get out of high crime areas or cramped population areas that the dems control and refuse to fix. Right?
This is Americans separating-and gee-the mass migration only goes one way. I think it’s saying that this isn’t even ‘liberals’ flocking to bluer states or more democrat areas to feel as if they are ‘more comfortable with their own kind’, politically.
No. The dems in the red states seem to be staying put. They like their lives well enough and don’t seem to have reasons to leave.
But republican and conservative voters-and all sorts of people who probably don’t even care about politics-so much as they care about what they’d call ‘quality of life’ issues like crime and taxes?
Gee- those are the people who seem to be moving in the largest numbers. And all toward red states and counties.
This isn’t coincidence. It can’t be explained away by covid-
Not when nearly one of every four people counted here- a million people- just moved locations last year. In 2023. That’s not a covid-inspired move. That’s suffering Americans trying to find relief in the red states.
photo credit: Getty Images
story credit: J/S online