Author, columnist, speaker
Will Americans Let the Pollsters Decide for Them?
By Robert Knight
We keep getting harassed by pollsters.
They call our cell phones, text us, and send emails begging us to participate. We do not.
In the age of AI, who knows where the information will go? We have no idea whether it is friend or foe doing the harvesting.
Many of our family and friends, mostly conservatives, feel the same. On the other hand, people of liberal bent are more likely to answer surveys, according to surveys.
That’s why I don’t trust current polls about the midterms, which show the GOP behind in most contestable races.
Is Texas really going to elect a blaspheming fake Christian like James Talarico to the U.S. Senate because Ken Paxton has a messy divorce? I don’t think so.
Eight years ago, the Democrats’ new blue hope at the time, the preppy Beto O’Rourke, lost to Sen. Ted Cruz, and Mr. Talarico makes Mr. O’Rourke look like Chuck Norris.
Nor do I think that Michigan voters will send to the Senate a guy like Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, a Democrat who has campaigned with Hasan Piker, the f-bomb throwing anti-American Islamist/communist.
Like Mr. Talarico, Mr. El-Sayed is bolting like a greyhound away from his leftist past. “Defund the police.” Who, me?
Much of the Democratic Party, like Mr. El-Sayed, supports a socialist takeover of the health care industry via “Medicare for all.”
They assure us that the federal government will run it as efficiently as, say, the federal government, which is rife with fraud and waste and has racked up a $40 trillion national debt.
Mr. El-Sayed was a major supporter of the climate-hysteria scheme called the Green New Deal. His staff has been scrubbing online references to it since his primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, rightly accused him of endangering Michigan’s auto industry.
He beat her by less than one percentage point.
Republicans in Michigan have a strong Senate candidate in Rep. Mike Rogers, who, among other things, has been outspoken against communist China’s espionage, cyber hacking, telecom security and Chinese investments in Michigan.
He came within a whisker of winning the 2024 U.S. Senate race in Michigan, losing by less than 1 percent to Democrat Elissa Slotkin.
On a more general level, the media are ignoring things like the upsurge in Republican voter registrations over the past decade.
Announcing a voter registration initiative in January, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin acknowledged, "Between 2020 and ’24 alone, our party lost a combined 2.1 million registered voters. Meanwhile, Republicans gained 2.4 million voters."
In Pennsylvania, for instance, Democrats had a 916,000-voter advantage in 2016. But they now have an edge of only 206,000 in a state with 9 million registered voters.
Nevada, in which Democrats were ahead, has swung back to a Republican advantage.
In Florida, Republicans have increased their lead to more than 1.5 million registrations.
In North Carolina, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats for the first time in 22 years, although independents account for the largest share of the electorate.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is counting on name recognition and tagging his Senate opponent, Michael Whatley, as a Trump insider. Mr. Whatley chaired the North Carolina Republican Party and the Republican National Committee.
Most polls show Mr. Cooper leading.
Mr. Whatley’s ads accuse Mr. Cooper of being soft on criminals and of being a career politician.
So far, Mr. Whatley has not reminded voters about Mr. Cooper’s Achilles heel: his inexplicable embrace of the transgender agenda, which includes the medical mutilation of sexually confused children.
In July 2023, Mr. Cooper vetoed three bills from the Republican-led legislature. One bars biological males from girls’ and women’s high school and college sports teams. Another bans medical sexual transitions for minors. A third restricts gender identity content in early grades and requires officials to inform parents about children’s pronoun changes.
With public support surging on these issues, legislators easily overrode Mr. Cooper’s vetoes and made them law. This suggests that adding a Trump-style “they/them” ad in North Carolina might prove effective.
Meanwhile, day after day, the media keep unveiling polls that seem designed to discourage Republicans from voting. If there’s no hope, why bother?
But polls have been spectacularly wrong, and always against Republicans. In 1980, they had Ronald Reagan in a virtual tie with Jimmy Carter. Mr. Reagan won in a landslide, netting 489 electoral votes to Mr. Carter’s 49.
In 2024, polls showed Kamala Harris slightly favored to win nationally and in several battleground states. Donald Trump won the popular vote, all seven battleground states, and took 312 electoral votes.
Both parties need to motivate their base while convincing independents that they can be trusted to bring down gas prices, control crime, curb the cost of health care, keep the border secure, stand up to our enemies, and resist—not abet—cultural rot.
Democrats have no history of doing any of that. Quite the opposite.
In 2025, nine out of 10 Muslim voters went for Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who is now New York City’s first Muslim/communist mayor. So did a third of the city’s Jewish voters, in a shocking display of suicidal empathy.
In Michigan, Mr. El-Sayed is counting on Muslims to vote heavily Democratic.
But if Christian voters outside Dearborn have even a slightly above average turnout, Mr. Rogers will win, no matter what the polls say.
And that would be the case for Republicans nationally as well.
Illustration by Alexander Hunter / The Washington Times.
Beware of the Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
By Robert Knight
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear appears to be readying for a presidential run in 2028.
The telegenic Democrat was on a speaking tour last year in early primary state South Carolina. In September, he has a book coming out entitled, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country,” a reference to Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan.
His publisher summarizes it this way: “By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, he believes we can start to heal as a country.”
Compassion and kindness are God-given, but I thought we were in the midst of healing from the nightmare of the Biden years, with its promotion of atheism, illegal immigration, sexual anarchy, and attacks on Catholics and pro-lifers.
Mr. Beshear, like Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, identifies as a Christian and a moderate and gets priceless media cover while supporting the Democratic Party’s radical social and economic agenda.
In 2023, for instance, he tried to block a state bill protecting minors from “gender affirming care.”
The law prohibits doctors from subjecting gender-confused teens to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible, disfiguring surgeries.
The law also bans males from competing on girls’ sports teams. Most people think this makes sense.
Beshear insisted that such a law “would hurt kids and their families” and violate “parental rights.”
He claimed there was no evidence of widespread harm. To which I would say one butchered child is too many and that evidence of harm is voluminous, including the growing number of suicides and trans-related violence.
On the same day of Mr. Beshear’s veto, both houses of Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode it. Naturally, a federal judge, Rebecca Grady Jennings, issued an immediate injunction halting enforcement. The case is still in litigation.
A year earlier, Ms. Jennings, one of President Donald Trump’s few clunker appointees, struck down a Kentucky law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks and requiring medical oversight for abortion pills.
Gov. Beshear also vetoed that bill, and the legislature overrode him.
In South Carolina, which went for Mr. Trump by 30 points, Mr. Beshear emphasized his Christian faith while boasting that he was “a proud, pro-LGBTQ+ governor.”
This is a stance that ignores Jesus Christ’s clear restating of God’s creation of male and female and God’s marriage-based sexual morality from Genesis.
According to the Washington Post, Mr. Beshear said, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God, and I didn’t want people picking on those kids.” How about protecting them from quacks who sterilize them and turn them into lifetime medical cases?
By the way, politicians love to haul out the term “children of God” like a magic amulet. The Bible says we’re all created in the image of God, but that we’re not children of God unless we believe in Him and submit to God’s authority. Until then, we’re on the other team, and I don’t mean the New Jersey Devils.
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name,” John 1:12 says. If we’re automatically children of God, we wouldn’t need to be, as Jesus said, born again.
Anyway, Mr. Beshear is not the only wolf in sheep’s clothing. Democrats have become quite adept at using Christianese and buzzwords to fool people. President Barack Obama often gave biblical scholars heartburn over his misappropriating Jesus’s words to justify sexual sin and confiscatory redistribution of wealth.
In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico is battling hard-left U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator. Like Mr. Beshear, Mr. Talarico touts his Christian faith while cleaving to a radical agenda.
“He delivers left-wing orthodoxy in centrist packaging and fights Christian nationalism with Scripture,” the Wall Street Journal explains.
If you’re a patriotic Christian, he’s talking about you and your family as a threat to America.
Much of his rhetoric revolves around Marxist class envy, such as, “Make billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.”
During remarks opposing a bill protecting kids from transgender treatments, he said, “Jesus never once condemned transgender people.”
Well, Jesus didn’t need to, and He welcomed all repentant sinners. The Hebrew Scriptures are crystal clear on sexual morality. Sexual confusion is the province of paganism, which historically often involved child sacrifice as well.
Any comparison to the pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ Democratic Party inferred by readers at this juncture may not be coincidental.
In a 2024 interview with MSNBC, Mr. Talarico said, “Christian nationalism is dangerous. … When politicians use the Bible to push division and hate, they’re not following Jesus; they’re using His name for their own agenda.”
This is classic projection, accusing your opponents of exactly what you’re doing.
Illustration by Alexander Hunter / The Washington Times.