I hear a train

President Joe Biden continues to resist calls from Democrats to quit his flagging reelection bid, and continues to accede to prayers from Republicans not to. 

He has set some pre-conditions on quitting that he figures will never be fulfilled. “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,” he said last week.

At his rare press conference a few days later, he said he’d quit if the polls said, “There’s no way [he] could win.” He followed that up with “No poll says that” in that creepy, corny stage whisper he has affected.

Yesterday, he said he would run “unless I get hit by a train.”

It all reminds me of an old religious joke. A believer was caught in a flood. He made his way to the rooftop of his house, confident that God would save him.

As the waters rose, a bystander on higher ground tossed him a rope. “Grab the rope! I’ll pull you over to this high ground!” yelled the bystander.

The man declined the rope. “No, the Lord will save me.” The bystander shrugged his shoulders and walked away. The water continued to rise.

Along came a speedboat with some rescuers. “Hop in the boat!” they instructed the man.

“No, the Lord will save me,” he explained. The boat sped away to rescue others. The water on the roof rose to the man’s waist.

Finally, a helicopter came overhead. They dropped a line. “Tie it around yourself and we’ll fly you away!”

The man refused again. “No, the Lord will save me.”

The water rose over the man’s head and he drowned. When he appeared in Heaven, he immediately found God and confronted him with the tragedy. “I thought you would save me! I told everyone you would! And then I drowned!”

God said, “Huh? I sent you a man with a rope, a speedboat, and a helicopter.”

Pollsters don’t ask “Is there any way that Candidate X cannot win?” What they ask is which candidate the polled person intends to vote for. According to NYT and WSJ polls, Joe Biden is losing by 6 points in the popular vote.

That’s even worse than it sounds, because Democrats have to win the popular vote by about 3 points to offset their disadvantage in the Electoral College. (That’s because they win in landslides in states where they win, such as California, but still get only the electoral votes assigned to those states, while they lose the close states. That happened in George W. Bush’s win in 2000 and again in Trump’s win in 2016.)

So, in reality, Biden is losing by about 9 points in today’s polls. And he’s polling about 15 points behind where he was at this point in the close 2020 election.

In pollster language, that translates to “There’s no way he can win.”

As for the Lord Almighty, I wonder if Joe watches the news. In a small-town event in Pennsylvania last Saturday, a creepy kid seems to have taken to heart Biden’s suggestion the day before that a bullseye be put on Trump.

The kid snuck past the DEI-infused Secret Service to get a shot at Trump from relatively close range with a telescoped high-powered rifle. At the last possible split second, Trump cocked his head to make a point. The bullet grazed his right ear, missing his cranium by a fraction of an inch. (Sadly, a man behind him was struck and died instantly.)

In religious language, that translates to “The Almighty Lord came down.”

Now what’s that rumbling I hear?