POLL: Biden & Sanders Both Beat Trump in Texas. No Other Democratic Candidate Does

Submitted by Eric Zuesse…

Emerson College polls are rated B+, well above average but not great, in the 538-dot-com carefully tabulated rankings of 497 polling organizations. The following Emerson College poll-findings from Texas registered voters were released on August 13th:

Emerson College Poll of 1,033 Registered Voters in Texas During 1-3 August:

Biden 50.8% v. Trump 49.2%
Sanders 50.6% v. Trump 49.4%
O’Rourke 48.1% v. Trump 51.9%
Buttigieg 48.0% v. Trump 52%
Warren 47.6% v. Trump 52.4%
Castro 47.2% v. Trump 52.8%
Harris 46.2% v. Trump 53.8%

Among only the poll’s 400 Democratic Party voters, Biden is strongly preferred above any other Democrat:

Biden 27.7%
O’Rourke 19.0%
Sanders 15.7%
Warren 13.7%
Buttigieg 7.2%
Harris 5.3%
Yang 3.1%

BOTTOM LINE — Reasonable inferences from this poll:

Biden is likely to win the Texas primary; and, in the general election, Biden is likely to beat Trump in Texas. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, he is approximately as likely to beat Trump in Texas in the general-election contest as is Biden. If Buttigieg or Warren win the nomination, then they would probably be within striking distance of being able to beat Trump in Texas, but they would be more likely to lose Texas to Trump. Harris would be even likelier to lose Texas to Trump.

In any case: Texas is no longer a sure bet to vote Republican. Trump could lose Texas, which he had won by a 10% margin — 52.2% to Clinton’s 42.2% — in 2016. Even against the weaker realistically possible Democratic candidates such as Harris, he has far smaller Texas victory margins in this poll than he actually enjoyed in the 2016 general-election contest against Clinton.

Therefore, Trump now seems to be far likelier to lose in 2020 than he had ever seemed likely to lose in 2016. In 2016, it was a real horse-race; but, now, even the formerly solidly Republican state of Texas — the largest of all of the states which voted for Trump in 2016, with 36 electoral votes (the second-largest state after California’s 55 electoral votes, and those votes went to Clinton) — is actually in play for a possible Democratic win of Texas in 2020.

Consequently, a Trump win of the national Presidential contest is far less likely even than was the case in 2016. This time around, Trump’s winning in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania won’t be nearly enough in order for him to have a fighting chance of winning the Presidency. His sharply lowered support now in Texas indicates that far more states are likely to be essential wins for him, in order for Trump to be able to retain his office.

None of the leading Democratic contenders this time around is even nearly as widely and deeply loathed nationally as Hillary Clinton was. The only candidate who likely will be is Trump himself, who, even in 2016, was approximately as widely loathed as she was.

Maybe a realistic estimate is that this time around, Trump will have a 10% chance of winning. He’s practically already a lame duck President. He has done that to himself, by what he has done while in office. Perhaps the only thing that might be able to keep him in office beyond 2020 would be devastating findings against Barack Obama and his Democratic Party, resulting from the current U.S. Justice Department’s investigation into possible rigging by the Obama Administration in 2016 in order for Democrats to have been able to present what turned out to have been a phony ‘Russiagate’ case against then-candidate, and now-President, Trump, which case against him consumed Trump’s first few years as the President. Such a shocker, such a counter-scandal (i.e., this time, against Democrats, and being backed by convincing evidence, if it turns out to be that) might happen between now and the November 2020 U.S. Presidential election. But, right now — and barring such a shocker as that — Trump’s prospects to retain office are bleak, on the basis of these poll-findings.

MY CONCLUSIONS:

Normally, one poll doesn’t mean much, but this one actually does mean much — its findings are strong enough, and reliable enough, and in a large enough (the second-largest) state, so as for them to mean a great deal about the likelihood that Trump will turn out to have been a one-term President. That likelihood now is extraordinarily high.

Consequently, whoever wins the Democratic Party’s nomination will almost certainly become President in 2021. The voters in that Party’s Presidential primaries and caucuses will almost certainly end up having selected America’s next President. And, unless either Warren or Sanders early enough endorses* the other of those two (which each of those two has an obligation to do if that person cares more about the country than about him-or-her-self winning the nomination — and it furthermore actually could, for each of them, increase greatly his/her likelihood* of actually winning the nomination), that next U.S. President appears likeliest to be Joe Biden. Since his long record has already proven him to be excessively mistake-prone, Biden’s actually being the Democratic candidate could very well then reduce his voter-support in Texas well below the present poll’s showing, of Biden 50.8% v. Trump 49.2%; and I therefore predict that if  the nominee is Biden, he would actually lose in Texas and lose the election, just as Hillary did in 2016. Both are/were incompetent — even more so than is Trump. The present poll can’t even possibly show that — it’s way too early to show it.

America seems heading for hell. Yet another rotten U.S. President could tip the future into catastrophe. Voters in each Party are by far unrealistically respecting their particular Party’s latest Presidents — ALL of America’s recent Presidents (and Congresses) have produced (ever since 1980) historically unprecedented skyrocketing federal debt along with a transfer of national wealth from the public to the billionaires, which has resulted in no benefit to the public, but instead an equally soaring personal debt, so that only the billionaires have net-benefited, and everyone else is in a worse situation than was the case in 1980 (far worse, because not just government but also personal indebtedness has soared while the public’s standard of living has flatlined since 1980 and the only real change for the public has therefore been their skyrocketing debt. Too few voters know how to process information. That obliviousnesss gave Americans the Hobson’s choice, of Clinton versus Trump, in 2016; and I think that voters don’t learn from history and that they will therefore repeat it, even now at the precipice (heading off the ever-higher cliff). The majority of voters consider acceptable what is happening in America, no matter how bad it has actually become, and now is. Very few people will survive such a fall.

They don’t know how bad things actually are. For examples: they consider acceptable, as the U.S. President, Joe Biden who as a Senator in 2002 voted to allow then-President George W. Bush to make, all on his own, the decision as to whether or not to invade Iraq (when everyone already knew that Bush strongly wanted to do precisely that), and to consider acceptable also the choice in 2016 between Hillary Clinton who — also as a Senator — had likewise voted just as Biden did on that fateful occasion, versus Donald Trump, who had no record at all as a federal U.S. official and who therefore could be judged only on the basis of his lying words.

Americans think that this is democracy. It’s not. It’s instead voters who have never been educated about how to process information. (A country like that cannot be a democracy.) It’s a profoundly corrupt country — and that’s why the public haven’t ever been taught (as they should have been in elementary school) how to process information. Americans instead have been taught myths (lauditory toward the billionaires).

And Americans therefore find the present situation to be acceptable. It’s not, but they don’t know this, because they’ve been kept ignorant, not about what to think (those myths, religious and otherwise, taught to children) but how  to think (as any scientist must).

That fact (the public’s ignorance of how to think, and the corruption which produces that) can destroy a nation, and can even destroy the entire world. And it’s happening now, right before our very eyes, as we approach the cliff.

There won’t be any real mystery about why bad and worse result from this. The reason why is already clear, and has been evident for a long time — and, yet, most Americans know little or nothing about this dire situation, much less about the institutionalized corruption that is producing it.

Either the next U.S.President will be more of the same, or else it will be one who leads revolutionary changes, in the correct directions, which are far different from what this country has been on, ever since at least 1980. The options for America are now that stark.

*Here is how I propose that this be done: On the night of the New Hampshire primary, Tuesday 11 February 2020, both Warren and Sanders will announce that she/he will remain in the contest until all of the state primaries and caucuses are over on 2 June 2020; and that, then, whichever of the two will, by the end, have the fewer number of won delegates will throw her/his support to the other of these two candidates at the Convention. This will not only allow each of the two to remain in the contest until the end, but it will be a clear and unambiguous unity between them, announcing that what is the most important thing, of all, to each of them, is that one of the two of them ought to become the Party’s nominee. This unification between them will also free each of the two from ever at all criticizing the other during the primaries. They will already, after 11 February 2020, effectively constitute a team, moving forward together, not for him/her-self alone, but for the Party, and for the nation. That’s how it should be done.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.