Which Team Will Be the Lesser of Two Evils on Election Day?

For the past two years, many Democrats thought that victory in 2018 would simply be a matter of running against Donald Trump. The only question in the minds of some activists was how big the "blue wave" would be.

For those in the party, opposing the president seemed to be enough. Two-thirds of Democrats (64 percent) believe that Hillary Clinton would have won the election without any Russian interference. Seventy-four percent of Democrats believe Trump should be impeached and removed from office.

While those positions make sense to partisan Democrats, the fact remains that most other voters disagree. As a result, running against the president may not be enough.

That approach didn't work two years ago because 10 percent of voters cast their ballot for candidate Trump despite thinking he was unqualified to serve as president of the United States. Those voters made him President Trump simply because they perceived him as the lesser of two evils.

It is possible, and perhaps likely, that many undecided midterm voters are once again trying to decide which team is the lesser of two evils. While many have doubts about the current president, only 35 percent believe the country would be better off today if Hillary Clinton had won. A slightly larger number (41 percent) believe things would be worse with Clinton in the White House.

At ScottRasmussen.com, we took a look at the voters who have not yet decided how they will vote (or IF they will vote). The president's job approval is just 41 percent among these uncommitted voters. If the election is purely a referendum on Trump, these voters might break heavily for the Democrats.

On the other hand, just 16 percent of these uncommitted voters believe life would be better if Clinton had won. Thirty-six percent think things would be worse. In many ways, these voters are hoping there is a way for both teams to lose.

That background explains why the migrant caravan of people fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras could have a significant impact on the final results. It's an issue the president wants to talk about and the Democrats want to avoid. That's because 79 percent of all voters believe illegal immigration is bad for the nation.

What about all those uncommitted voters? Sixty-five percent of them support sending U.S. military troops to the southern border to enforce the law. Fifty-seven percent believe that at least some of the participants in the caravan present a national security threat.

Even more dramatically, only 10 percent of the uncommitted voters want people admitted into the U.S. without a case-by-case review. Two-thirds (66 percent) believe that they should either be turned away at the border or held in a detention center.

In other words, the migrant caravan is precisely the sort of issue the president wants uncommitted voters to focus on in the closing days of the campaign. It's an issue that uncommitted voters might just conclude makes Republicans the lesser of two evils.

The great divide--actually, the "chasm"--which exists between most Americans in the vast geographic area between the fringe left and right coast city populations can be seen by viewing the voting map of Hillary voters in 2016!

The populations of that vast area continue to value the enduring ideas which motivated the Founders and Framers of America's Constitution over 200 years ago to seek, above all, FREEDOM (liberty) for individuals.

Even today, words matter, and the words of the Declaration of Independence mean something to those who value that document's claims.

On the other hand, Progressive actions to devalue those documents and words are rejected, as evidenced by that voting map.

In an effort to explain what may highlight the "chasm," that great author of The Conservative Mind," Russell Kirk, is quoted below:

". . . the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.
"Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.
". . . The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal."
http://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/

A map, available online, of Hillary's voters, will show that those votes come from slivers of the population centers on the East and West coastlines, and few from across the breadth of America.

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe." - Thomas Jefferson

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