Democrats join race to the bottom

After what seemed to most outsiders to be a disastrous Republican Convention comes the bizarre news that Donald Trump is now 5% ahead of Hillary Clinton in the polls. Now, polls can be wrong - indeed, in recent years, they usually are - and we are still months away from the actual vote. But it provides yet more evidence, if more were needed, that this presidential vote is thoroughly unlinked from common sense and from reality.

The poll was, I think, taken after at least part of the first day of the Democratic Convention, which is looking set to out-weird the Republican one. All the Dems had to do was keep it together, stay united and look vaguely electable, but even that seemed outside their ability. Instead, we have a Russian-engineered Wikileaks leak of emails suggesting that the Democratic "establishment" were strongly pushing Hillary amd not Bernie (hardly news, I wouldn't have thought), the consequent resignation of Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not to mention huge and extremely vocal pro-Sanders protests (despite Sanders' own exhortations for party unity and his unequivocal calls for everyone to support Clinton). The Bernie Or Bust crowd embarrassed themselves still further by chanting "Lock her up!", showing that they are on the same intellectual level as the Republican wags who dreamed up that particular political jewel.

So, it seems that these highly-politicized, supposedly thoughtful and intelligent people would prefer to see four years of Republican rule under a loose cannon like Donald Trump than elect a Democratic leader who is much closer on most political issues to their own views, even if not quite the same. This, surely, is almost as misguided as the white, working class guys who see Trump as some kind of saviour.

Maybe the Democrats' strategy is to embarrass themselves as much as possible, given that it seems to have been pretty successful for Donald Trump and the Republicans. **Sigh**

 

UPDATE

Given that the rest of the Democratic Convention proceeded without major hitches, more recent opinion polls have seen a sharp upswing in support for Ms. Clinton and against Mr. Trump, fuelled in part by the continued erosion of support for, and general disaffection with, Trump in the financial community and within the Republican Party as a whole. So, all is not lost. And, it doesn't really bear thinking about, but we are still 3 months away from the actual vote: all indications to date suggest that things could change ten times during that period!