MAJOR UPDATE: Today's Must Read: Is Biden 'Floundering'?

Today's must read is Don Surber. He's quoting extensively from a UK Daily Mail story. The Daily Mail of late has been relentlessly and stridently anti-Trump, but it's story--as Surber puts it--is eye catching. Or maybe eye popping. Anyway, I really needed this today. I had spent most of yesterday's slow-except-for-Judge-Amy news day reading about the influence of big money over our politics: big government (esp. DoD) money, big tech money, big foreign and international money. The desperation with which Big Money wants Trump gone should tell you all you need to know about why we need four more years: they're not in it for the little people. So I clutched at Surber's blog like a a drowning man clutching for, well, anything afloat. Read it all, but here's my teaser:

Further evidence the 10-point lead is fake

The headline in the Daily Mail intrigued me, "Joe's SOS to Barack: Obama to return to campaign trail to help floundering Biden and [Obama] releases ad urging Democrats to vote."

Wait a second. The average of the polls at Real Clear Politics showed Biden has a 10-point lead over President Donald John Trump.

Dozens of people are attending his rallies ...

...

Obama did the same thing 4 years ago.

ABC reported, "President Obama's campaign blitz for Hillary Clinton is historic."

The story said, "For Obama, his passionate appeal to voters to elect Clinton is about more than his confidence in his former secretary of state. It’s also about securing his legacy."

It's pretty hard to argue with that. A ten point lead, consistently maintained for months, should translate into: lapped the field and coasting to the finish line in a walk. If we're not hearing that he's floundering, that has to mean the polls are utterly fake.

As for Big Money, here are two of the depressing articles that tell you about what's become of the American Empire--up for sale from under its citizens. This, also from Surber, gives a hint of the swampish nature of our politics and governance:

Cutting off the swamp's Chinese money

This hints at the unholy alliances among government agencies and departments and "think tanks":

Top 50 U.S. Think Tanks Receive Over $1B from Gov, Defense Contractors

There were a bunch of others, and it all painted a daunting picture of what Trump is up against.

UPDATE: Steve Hayward at Powerline--a recovering NeverTrump--reads the NYT so the rest of us don't have to. And we don't have to link it, either, since he offers the real money quotes. The story he read for us today is by Thomas Edsall, who has been covering national politics for decades. His specialty is what you might call political demographics. He's definitely liberal but, weirdly, also looks at facts. His article today is called 

Biden Is Not Out of the Woods

Unanticipated electoral developments are affecting both presidential campaigns in surprising ways.

 

and you can follow the link if the excerpts below aren't enough for you. Anyway, just the title suggests that Biden may be floundering in those woods. Edsall doesn't want to be alarmist, but he couldn't help noticing a few things:

One thing continues to stand out, even in the polls these pieces describe, which is that white Democrats, who remain the majority in their party, have been moving leftward for nearly a decade, particularly on racial and moral issues, and that shift has pushed the party further away from the nation’s median voter. This gap has damaged Democratic prospects in the past, but the ultimate outcome of Trump’s determined efforts to capitalize on it has not yet been revealed.

Here are some of the things causing anxiety among Democratic partisans, particularly political professionals. One way to measure voter enthusiasm is to compare voter registration trends for each party. A Democratic strategist who closely follows the data on a day-to-day basis wrote in a privately circulated newsletter:

“Since last week, the share of white non-college over 30 registrations in the battleground states has increased by 10 points compared to September 2016, and the Democratic margin dropped 10 points to just 6 points. And there are serious signs of political engagement by white non-college voters who had not cast ballots in previous elections.”

Political engagement by people who had not cast ballots in previous elections? Wait, that means those people didn't vote in 2016, so there may be a large pool of new-to-Trump voters that is just now being tapped into. Those are the people the Trump team has been reaching out to and registering. As Hayward points out--all those rallies aren't just for fun. There are a lot of them and those people aren't captured by the usual "likely voters" polls.

 

David Wasserman, House editor for The Cook Political Report. wrote on Oct. 1 that voter registration patterns over a longer period in key battleground states show that “Republicans have swamped Democrats in adding new voters to the rolls, a dramatic GOP improvement over 2016.”

Four of the six states Trump won by fewer than five points in 2016 allow voters to register by party: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. In recent months, there have been substantially more Republicans added to the rolls than Democrats in each of them except for Arizona.

 

And basically holding level with the GOP in AZ isn't really such good news for the Dems, given that there are so many Blue State refugees in AZ now. 

Wasserman’s data:

Florida, since the state’s March primary, added 195,652 Republicans and 98,362 Democrats.

Pennsylvania, since June, Republicans plus 135,619, Democrats up 57,985.

North Carolina, since March, Republicans up 83,785 to Democrats 38,137.

In Arizona, the exception, “Democrats out-registered Republicans 31,139 to 29,667” in recent months.

Those numbers should definitely explain the panic we're seeing among Dems.

ADDENDUM: Here's why those numbers are so alarming for Dems, and why they're a proxy for voter enthusiasm.

It's typical in many states--including states that often go GOP--that Dem registration exceeds GOP registration by a significant margin. GOPers simply don't register by party the way that Dems do. So when you see a sudden reversal of that pattern--new GOP registrations outnumbering new Dem registrations by such a wide margi--you can logically surmise that:

1. New voters are coming into the system;

2. Those voters feel strongly and are presumably enthusiastic or highly motivated to vote;

3. Those new voters are heavily Trump voters.

That should mean that Trump is acquiring much safer margins that won't show up in the usual polls.