“You Wanna Talk About Polls? This Is My Poll Here”

Despite the Murdoch Derangement of the “progressive” left, Murdoch papers like The Australian offer a far greater range of opinion than the ABC or The Guardian. Where, for example, is the ABC’s equivalent to droning old communist Phillip Adams’s regular Oz column? Or to strident feminist Nikki Gemmell?

More to the point, it might shock Grauniad readers to learn that most of the senior political writers at The Australian are strident Never-Trumpers. Especially its Washington correspondent Cameron Stewart. The Oz’s Never-Trumpers have been eagerly reporting – or hoping to report – the dire polling for President Trump in the impending election.

So it must have been a galling experience for Stewart to abandon the Washington bubble and fearlessly venture into the darkest wilds of battleground state Pennsylvania and witness the extraordinary enthusiasm the president inspires across the length and breadth of flyover country.

“You wanna talk about polls?’ says Mark Stefura as Air Force One drops from the clouds and lands next to us in Lititz, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

“This is my poll here. Look at this huge crowd, willing to stand in the rain for hours just to see their president,” says Stefura, an airconditioning salesman, as he stands with me amid a sea of screaming Trump supporters.

“This is what enthusiasm looks like and this is why Donald Trump will win this election hands down. The rest of America is going to be crying big time, just like in 2016.”

Indeed, much as I dislike political prognostication, the parallels with 2016 are eerily similar. Polls and the media vying each other to be as one-sided as possible and reassure themselves that there is no way, no how, that Trump has any chance of winning, ever.

It’s not just the deplorables in the boonies, either. A friend recently posted photos from a Trump rally in the heart of liberal-dom, Beverley Hills. “Black Lives MAGA”, “Latinos for Trump”, “Native Americans for Trump”, a “Lady MAGA” drag queen and “LGBT for Trump”. The atmosphere, she says, was vibrant: “happy, loving people”.

And yet, while Trump pulls a crowd like that in the epicentre of American right-on progressivism, Joe Biden inspires such enthusiasm that tens of people turn up to his rallies, no matter how many celebrities he puts on.

Stefura leans over and tells me: “Joe Biden had a rally up in Dallas, Pennsylvania, on Saturday and he had Bon Jovi there and Bon Jovi sang to 12 people and a bunch of Halloween pumpkins”.

On the other hand, the enthusiasm for Trump is visible everywhere.

With just a week to go until the US election, the 45th President is on an extraordinary rampage across America, a jaw-dropping schedule of rallies as he seeks a historic come-from-behind victory against Joe Biden.

The President is everywhere you look, dominating the news cycle, creating havoc and controversy for his opponents and rock-star adulation from his loyal army. By contrast, Biden is barely visible, adopting the lowest profile campaign of any candidate in modern US history. On Tuesday (AEDT) Trump held an astonishing three separate rallies, each more than an hour long, around the key swing state of Pennsylvania before returning to the White House for the swearing in of the new conservative Supreme Court judge Amy Coney Barrett. Just weeks ago the 74-year-old was in hospital recovering from COVID-19.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden is literally hiding in his basement and refusing to campaign at all in the dying weeks of the election.

On stage he speaks for more than an hour, mixing his stump speech on the teleprompter with anecdotes and wild off-topic riffs which bring the loudest cheers. He tells them that Biden is beholden to the Bernie Sanders socialist wing of the Democrats and that his running mate Kamala Harris is “more liberal than crazy Bernie”.

As journalist Tim Poole has noted, to his surprise when he checked Harris’s voting record, the charge that she is further left than Sanders is entirely true.

“Don’t believe anything you see on the news, that’s why there is such a problem in this country, the media is so against him,” says 22-year-old college student Nathan Wechsler as he sits in the crowd wearing a stars and stripes Trump 2020 hoodie and cap[…]

Standing nearby wearing a Trump 2020 face mask, Charles Horax, tells me it is his first rally and he drove two hours from his construction business to be here. “I’m here because he is the best president I have ever seen in my lifetime”[…]

Paula Keperling, who owns a cabinetry business, says she hated Trump when he first said he would run years ago.

“Never in my life did I think I would vote for him.”

You can almost hear the gritted teeth as Cameron Stewart signs off his report:

If Trump wins next week, this is what his comeback looks like. If he loses, then he knows he has gone down swinging.

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