(I should say that no matter what people might think, I don’t write my columns as an ideologue, or a member of any team. I write as someone who seeks to explain this extraordinary election’s realities to people who want an honest and thoughtful way to look at it. Simple as that.)

Perspective:

The early evidence suggests that President Trump did not receive the large bounce in approval that he hoped for coming out of the Republican National Convention.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll taken over the last few days was especially harsh for Trump. Although it did not poll the race, it did poll the candidate’s favorability ratings. Last week, Trump’s favorable rating stood at 32 percent in an Ipsos poll.

Today, after the Republican National Convention, it stands at 31 percent.

According to the highly respected  FiveThirtyEight Election Update for Monday, August 24, as of 5 p.m. on Sunday, Joe Biden had a 73 in 100 chance of winning the 2020 presidential election, while President Trump had a 27 in 100 chance.

Biden also has a hefty lead in our forecast of the national popular vote: 53 percent to 46 percent.

I have a word for all the pundits eager to tell us that it is still possible for Donald Trump to win the election: Duh. Tell us something we don’t know.

The only way it would be impossible for Trump to win would be if there were a God, and he stepped in and controlled the way people vote. I don’t see that coming. God is rumored to be above partisan politics.

Jesus was a different story. He would turn Trump into stone.

I don’t grasp the need for journalists to keep telling us something that is so obvious and that has little relevance to the campaign right now. But beware of the hysterics and panic-mongers.

They make a lot of money off of fear.

Now is when it gets interesting if a little hairy.

Now is when politics becomes more fascinating than most other things, and this campaign is the most hypnotic and compelling political campaign I can ever remember seeing or reading about.

I was a reporter for a long time and loved the work.

I’ve been called a ghoul, a parasite, (and bloodless) a vampire, and a voyeur. These things are true, which is why I can detach myself from the humanity of it and look for the simple truth.

Ideologues have their windows all fogged up; it is difficult for them to accept reality.

I love my country and care who wins, but I can’t help but look at things from a distance.

This election is for the Democrats to lose. That is the bottom line and has been the bottom line for months.

If that changes radically, you will be the first to see it,  sense it and know.

In fact, Trump has proven that you can lie to all of the people most of the time. But he is also proving you can’t do it all the time. He has forgotten to slip in the truth now and then throw the wolves off his trail.

Some lies are too big to swallow.

No, he hasn’t done a great job of handling the pandemic, no he hasn’t been better to African Americans than Lincoln, no he isn’t empathetic and compassionate to the little people, except to use them as stage props, and no, he can’t bring “law and order” and peace to the country now.

He can’t even pretend to care about all of America’s wounded citizens.

CNN’s fact-checker called the president a serial liar for making more than 20 false, exaggerated or misleading claims during his nominating speech.

Something is wrong with that man, and many people are coming to see that—more than anything else that is shaping the November election.

It’s not smart to tell someone who lost his mom or grandmother or pop to the coronavirus that its all over, and you did a great job with it. Every time I start to think Trump might have a real chance to win, he opens his mouth, and the idea fades.

Trump is the President, and it is jarring to hear him accuse Joe Biden to bring chaos and lawlessness to the country. Trump is President right now, and there is plenty of chaos and lawlessness in the country. Nor does he have any plan for dealing with it.

I don’t think I’m the only one who has noticed that powerful irony.

This is a big hole for Joe Biden to exploit and he and Harris will have a rich time exploiting it. There is a need for Biden/Harris to be forceful about explaining their views on police reform and their objections to violence and chaos.

This is about the only horse left in Trump’s stable and he will ride it and ride it.

Biden is leaving Delaware on Labor Day weekend and beyond, just when it matters most. To me, the Democrats seem confident and competent.

The Republicans seem to be all over the place, unable to light on a coherent message, or more important, a reason for people to want four more years of Trump when most people are clearly sick of him.

The Trump supporters, like their leader, are louder.

That does not mean they are stronger.

No politician in modern American history has so many powerful forces working as one to remove him from office. I’ve seen nothing to see that they will fail, and much to see that they will succeed.

I don’t feel the need to keep saying Trump could win. I dislike qualifying my own reasoning, it seems cowardly to me, and exploitive.

The Trump campaign has forgotten that Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in the evening, averaged 3.4 million total prime time viewers, compared to 1.9 million for MSNBC and 1.4 million for CNN.

That earns Fox a lot of money, but 4.4 million viewers in a 328.2 million country is not a staggering number, and not nearly enough to win a national election.

Trump has to do a lot better than that.

It is also worth pointing out that almost all every one of Fox’s nighttime viewers are angry old white men 65 years of age or older. Fox ought to be very afraid about its future.

I’m beginning to see that Trump is beyond redemption with the voters he needs to win over. They just aren’t budging, even after his chorus – or tsunami –  of lies.

Real empathy is something you just can’t fake. Real governing takes more than pompous and self-serving speeches.

So now we come to the good part of this campaign. What will happen next?

Political observers and critics have been spooked by Trump’s elaborately staged (but boring) convention.  And especially by the violence and looting in several American cities.

Trump made that unrest a central message of the campaign and his speech.

For all the wizardry he is supposed to have when it comes to television, he did some more dumb things during the convention.

He forgot that TV viewers have very short attention spans. He talked too much and said too many conflicting things every night, especially on the last night. The Democratic ratings were higher than those for the Republican Convention.

He and his comrades called Biden everything under the sun, from corrupt to hating God to being a stooge for the radical left. Just about none of it stuck.

Democratic supporters were panicked by Trump and the ghosts of 2016. They feared Biden would stay in his basement for too long while the President ran all over the country, trashing him in those maskless rallies. (Wait until they start getting sick.)

Biden is not Hilary Clinton; he is prepared to get out and fight and take nothing for granted, unlike Hilary Clinton did. She expected to win and lost. Biden believes he could win if he handles it properly.

He’s had all summer to get ready while Trump rages like a wounded Buffalo.

So far, so good.

It was a masterstroke to be safe and quiet all summer while Trump made a fool out of himself almost daily: Tulsa, Chlorox, Roger Stone.

Trump continues to antagonize Blacks almost every day with his racist tweets and declarations. Black Lives Matter has lost ground in public approval polls, (Portland, Seattle, Kenosha) but it remains one of the most powerful social movements in our history.

Every time he does, he gets more and more voters who don’t like him to vote. I’ll leave it to the historians to explain it, but Mary Trump is right: Trump doesn’t do strategies and doesn’t listen to advice.

Expect the country to go bankrupt for sure if he wins re-election. He’s done it six times.

The election was supposed to be about the pandemic, but it turns out to be about Trump as much as the pandemic. An awful lot of people hate him as their President.

But the pandemic is important. It could fade or, as has happened in so many countries, return and rise up at any time, especially as the country rebels against taking the steps necessary to really stop it.

It would be interesting if the scientists were wrong and Trump was right about the pandemic. It would also be unprecedented.

I’m interested in following the campaign from here. I understand that there will be all kinds of bumps and twists and turns. But campaigns have their own hearts and soul and the debates will be three key elements.

Honestly, I don’t see any surprises coming. All Biden has to do to exceed expectations is not drool or forget where is. Trump is already suggesting Biden takes drugs to perk up when he talks.

Translation: He is afraid of him now. Trump looks worn, even defeated.

We know what Trump will be like. Without a teleprompter to cage him, he will be all over the place, saying and doing the things people hate him for while Biden sticks to his policy positions.

The people who love him will love him, the people who hate him will hate him evermore, which is the plan.

For all of the sturm and drang, cost, and hyperbole accusations and lies, this campaign in the Fall looks just like it did in the Spring.  When the fog lifts, it is a campaign of stone, of solid rock.

Unless widespread rioting and looting and killing breaks out all over the country, and even if it sadly does Trump – the reigning King – is the man with a bullseye on his back.