NEWS AND OPINION:
Should our greeting card companies get ready for yet another holiday? Maybe, and it has to do with ballots and politics. A major pollster has the news.
“Americans have long supported making Election Day a national holiday. But support for this has risen in recent years, from 65% in 2018 to 72% today. Currently, 78% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans favor this,” a Pew Research Center poll says.
“By contrast, support for allowing Election Day voter registration has dropped over the last several years — from 64% in 2018 to 57% now.This decrease is largely driven by declining support among Republicans: 39% currently favor Election Day voter registration, down from 49% four years ago. Another 76% of Democrats favor allowing Election Day registration, little different from the 78% who said this in 2018,” the pollster advised.
See more numbers in the Poll du Jour at column’s end.
TRUMP’S LATEST
Former President Donald Trump offers an energetic and often inventive outreach to those who support him — along with those who are considering jumping on the proverbial Trump train as Election Day approaches.
On Monday, his campaign offered an “Official MAGA Poll” by email — and here are some sample questions — in demanding all-capital letters, of course:
Are you voting for President Trump in 2024?
Do you support President Trump more or less after every single witch hunt, raid, indictment and arrest the radical left has thrown at him?
Do you support securing the border?
Do you support putting America first?
What would you say to President Trump right now if you could speak to him for 5 minutes?
THE TRUMP TOUCH
One columnist has parsed out a few of former President Donald Trump’s tactics as 2024 grinds on.
“I’ve said it many times. Donald Trump has the feral instincts of a big cat. He has an unerring sense of where his opponents’ weaknesses are and knows how to push just the right buttons to send them off into hysterical spasms of hate and loathing,” wrote Rick Moran, who has been penning a column for PJ Media for the last 18 years.
“The media gets hysterical because they believe voters just don’t understand how dangerous Trump is, how much of a threat he is to ‘democracy.’ But Trump has been in the national spotlight in one way or another for most of this century. The American people know he’s trolling the left. They know it because of the over-the-top reactions from the media and Democrats,” the columnist said.
“The voters see the disconnect between what the media is warning about Trump and the former president’s record. ‘Trump will do this’ or ‘Trump will do that’ if he’s elected is not a serious argument, and the voters aren’t convinced. Trump’s unpredictability has been his hallmark. How can anyone predict what he’s going to do if elected?” Mr. Moran later asked.
“The more hysterical and unbalanced the response to Trump, the more support he picks up,” he concluded in the column, which was released Monday.
MEANWHILE IN BOSTON
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is looking up — literally — when it comes to solving immigration challenges in her state.
“The governor’s office is looking for empty office space to house the influx of migrants overwhelming the state’s shelter system, as first seen in Boston’s Seaport, where residents were surprised by potential plans for a Fort Point office building,” the Boston Herald said in a report released Monday.
“Many office building managers in Boston were contacted and the owner of 24 Farnsworth St., a private property, said that roughly 10,000 square feet of space was available for a potential overflow shelter,” an unnamed official told the Herald.
Other cities in Massachusetts have been directed to do the same, the official said. The next step is financing the possible project — a process still in the planning stage.
NEVER A DULL MOMENT
You’ve likely heard of Category 5 hurricanes — dangerous weather events with wind speeds of up to 158 mph. Get ready for Category 6.
Climate scientists Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and James Kossin of the First Street Foundation wondered whether the open-ended Category 5 is sufficient to communicate the risk of hurricane damage in a warming climate.
So they investigated and detailed their extensive research in a new article in which they also introduce a hypothetical Category 6 to the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale, which would encompass storms with wind speeds “greater than 192 mph,” according to the aforementioned Berkeley laboratory in a news release.
“When the team performed a historical data analysis of hurricanes from 1980 to 2021, they found five storms that would have been classified as Category 6, and all of them occurred in the last nine years of record,” the news release stated.
The research was published last week by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
POLL DU JOUR
• 82% of U.S. adults favor requiring electronic voting machines to print a paper backup of the ballot.
• 81% favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote.
• 76% favor making early, in-person voting available for at least two weeks before Election Day.
• 72% for making Election Day a national holiday.
• 69% favor allowing convicted felons to vote after serving their sentences.
• 57% favor allowing any voter to vote by mail.
• 57% favor automatically registering all eligible citizens to vote.
• 57% favor allowing people to register on Election Day at the polls.
• 47% favor banning groups from collecting completed ballots from large numbers of voters and returning them to official voting centers, i.e., ballot harvesting.
• 44% favor removing people from registration lists if they have not recently voted or confirmed their registration.
SOURCE: A Pew Research Center survey of 5,140 U.S. adults conducted Jan. 16-21 and released Feb. 7.
• Follow Jennifer Harper on X @HarperBulletin.
• Jennifer Harper can be reached at jharper@washingtontimes.com.
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