REUTERS
The presidential election remains close, but most recent polls show Donald Trump leading in nearly all the battleground states.
The margins are small, but the trend is clear, leading to nervousness in the Kamala Harris campaign.
NBC News reports her team is worried that Michigan is moving toward Trump, and perhaps Wisconsin, too, forcing her to seek alternative paths to 270 electoral votes.
It’s also telling that Democrats’ Senate candidates in those states, as well as others in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Montana, are putting distance between themselves and Harris, a sure sign they see her as a loser and don’t want to go down with her ship.
Some incumbent Dems even boast in ads and debates that Trump, when he was president, signed legislation they sponsored.
Miracle of miracles, he’s morphed from being a threat to democracy to being a president they can work with!
Things are so bad in Dem circles that there are rumblings Joe Biden would have been a better candidate!
The joy is gone.
For some analysts and Trump supporters, these developments are fueling talk he could actually win the Electoral College in a landslide and maybe even pull off a majority in the popular vote.
I hope he does both.
It’s exactly what America needs.
A decisive victory would bring a great moment of clarity for our nation and sound a certain trumpet around the world.
Our allies would benefit from having a president who believes in a strong military and honors defense agreements without being trigger happy.
Our adversaries, most notably Iran, Russia and China, would be put back on their heels by a president who won’t appease their aggressions.
Israel could again count on a White House that has its back instead of one that stabs it in the back.
New trade agreements would protect American workers instead of exporting their jobs.
In domestic political terms, a Trump landslide would be an unmistakable repudiation of the Democrats’ move toward woke radicalism.
The culture wars would, for the time being, be settled in favor of common sense and traditional values.
The DEI obsession, with its noxious mix of racism and Marxism, would find a deserved spot on the trash heap of history.
Strong contrast
Parents would no longer be treated by schools as the enemy.
School choice would be in and rapacious teacher unions would be out.
Police would have a friend in the Oval Office instead of a befuddled carping critic and there would be a push on cities and states to punish criminals instead of their victims.
The border would be open to legal immigration only and a boom in American energy production would help lower inflation and create good-paying jobs.
All these changes would take time to develop, of course, and some would happen only with GOP congressional majorities.
But Trump, during his first term and this campaign, has been so clear in drawing a contrast with the major policies of the Biden-Harris administration that a big victory would give him an obvious mandate.
Chance for new tone
Meanwhile, he would have the chance to strike a desperately needed new tone by nominating an attorney general and an FBI director who can restore federal law enforcement credibility by staying the hell out of politics.
The deep state, too, needs a deep cleaning and security clearances should be revoked for any former officials who abused them for partisan purposes.
Legacy media outlets would see their influence and credibility further reduced as a consequence of abandoning all standards of fairness to defeat Trump.
Similarly, Big Tech companies would have to conclude that censoring conservatives was a fool’s errand.
Should they forget, Elon Musk will be in a position to remind them.
And Trump’s plan of having Musk lead a government efficiency office is reason enough to vote for him.
There is no precise definition of a landslide, either for the popular vote or the Electoral College.
One theory holds that a 100-vote margin in the Electoral College meets the test, which would mean gaining at least 319 of the 538 votes.
Barack Obama did it in both his victories, with 365 and 332, as did Bill Clinton with 370 and 379 electoral votes.
The last Republican to pass the magic number was George H.W. Bush in 1988, when he won a whopping 426 electoral votes.
In the popular vote, Obama’s top mark was 53%, while Clinton never won a majority.
The two greatest landslides in modern times came in the re-elections of GOP presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
In ’72, Nixon won 520 electoral votes and Reagan won 525 in 1984.
Both won 49 states and overwhelming majorities of the popular vote, with Nixon hitting the modern high-water mark of 60.6%.
Recent elections have been much tighter, with Trump getting 304 electoral votes in 2016 and just 46% of the popular vote.
Four years later, Biden got 306 electoral votes and 51% of the popular.
‘Momentum building’
Ed Rollins, who ran Reagan’s juggernaut in ’84, thinks Trump has a shot at a landslide victory because the polls show his lead is based on his winning the policy arguments, including on the border, the economy and foreign policy.
“You see the momentum building,” Rollins told me Tuesday.
“And you get the feeling Democrats know it because of all the bitching and moaning they’re doing.”
He makes the point that landslides are organic and often don’t take shape until the very end of a campaign.
“You can see swings of 5 or 6 percent over the last few days,” he says.
“Everybody wants to be with a winner and that can mean most of the undecideds break in one direction.”
Because the president’s power is greatest in the area of foreign policy, the immediate impact of a Trump victory would be a new direction in the Mideast.
He doesn’t even have to wait until the inauguration to make his intentions clear.
Merely by replacing the current administration’s half-hearted support for Israel’s security, he would be telling Iran’s regime that its existence is in jeopardy if it continues to fire on Israel and direct its terror groups to attack the Jewish state.
The mullahs, who only favor suicide missions for their replacable pawns, are likely to be personally deterred by such a warning.
They haven’t forgotten how Trump droned Qasem Soleimani, their military terror chief who made the fatal mistake of killing Americans, and Trump hasn’t forgotten that they put out a contract to assassinate him.
The incoming president could further shape the playing field by saying he plans to reinstate the sanctions on Iranian oil and banks that Biden-Harris foolishly removed.
He could also remind the mullahs that America and Israel agree that Iran cannot be permitted to get nuclear weapons.
Those moves alone would make the world a much safer place for America and Israel as well as our Arab allies.
Vote accordingly.