15 Oct NBA Ratings are a Real Presidential Poll
So a popular American sport is super woke, prints “Black Lives Matter” on its playing courts, and empowers its players to use their jerseys to spread slogans of wokeness.
This wokeness, we are told, is a popular movement sweeping the country; corporate America can’t cave fast enough to prove it is in lockstep with this popular BLM movement; and the Democrat Party is all-in with support.
The sport’s most famous player visibly supports Joe Biden and despises President Trump. America’s MSM polls repeatedly tell us Joe Biden is enjoying a 10-point lead over President Trump. Who or what could be more in step with ‘what everybody is thinking’ than the NBA’s most famous player constantly extolling BLM and berating President Trump?
And that most famous player and his team earned a spot in the championship series, in a made for TV era when many Americans are more or less trapped at home with nothing to do.
Connect these dots, and the NBA would surely be set for a TV ratings bonanza when Lebron James and the Los Angeles Lakers made it to the best of seven finals against the Miami Heat.
Only that didn’t happen. It did not even come close to happening.
Ratings for the 2020 NBA Finals achieved historic lows; the 6th and deciding game drew somewhere between 6 and 7.5 million (depending on which ratings you want to believe)—or about one-third of what the 6th and deciding game drew last year (in which Lebron James was NOT playing) and less than 20% of what Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls drew in a sixth game of the Finals in 1998.
The radical left/twitter mob/Democrat Party and the NBA’s poster boy for leftwing smugness—Mark Cuban—would scream to the rafters that the NBA’s TV ratings have no relationship to the accuracy of presidential polling.
On the surface, of course, NBA TV ratings and presidential polling do not have an obvious relationship.
But we’ll offer a take that they in fact do.
And the ‘take’ is this: the MSM memes that BLM is popular; that America is a systemically racist and evil place that deserves BLM; that Lebron James is heroic for standing up for a guy like Jacob Blake (that Lebron James wouldn’t allow to be within 100 feet of James’ wife); and yes, that Joe Biden is 10 points ahead of Donald Trump—all are lies. Completely bogus. BS.
BLM is increasingly seen by Americans for what it is—a self-avowed Marxist organization determined to overthrow the American system of government under the Constitution, and to destroy the nuclear (black) family and uphold the rampant abortion of (black) babies—and black and white and brown and every other color of Americans don’t like it.
Americans know their country is NOT systemically racist, and they don’t like arrogant elitists who lecture them otherwise.
And there are enough alternative media outlets to educate Americans about the character and actions of Jacob Blake—a man who was shot as he tried to reach inside his van (to grab a weapon?) while disobeying police orders and resisting arrest (an arrest prompted by a distress call to police made by a black woman who had a restraining order against Blake based on a previous sexual assault episode)—for LeBron and all Americans to know that this was not a clear cut case of abusive police conduct.
The beauty of TV ratings—as opposed to tricked up, manipulative polling techniques designed to oversample leftists and then shape rather than reflect opinion—is that they represent the proverbial phenomenon of ‘voting with your feet’—i.e., people exercising their freedom to simply ignore or walk away from that with which they are fed up. They don’t have to answer a question. Their actions answer the question.
There’s no fear of being scolded or embarrassed by the polltaker who seeks to make you ashamed of supporting Trump. There’s just a choice to watch the game with all of its narrative-carrying baggage, or not watch it. And the NOTs overwhelmingly outnumbered the watchers, relative to a year ago, relative to 22 years ago, relative to all NBA history.
Yet we are told to believe that Joe Biden, who stands in clear solidarity with everything the American people just emphatically tuned out, is riding a 10-point margin of polling popularity over President Trump.
In Biden’s words, that’s pure malarkey. It’s a story brought to the American people by the same institutions that said Trump may be a Russian agent; that Michael Flynn is a traitor; that Joe Biden captured on video conditioning American aid to Ukraine in exchange for Ukrainian prosecutors laying off Biden’s son is not a problem but Trump wanting to investigate it is; that Brett Kavanaugh is a gang rapist; that Amy Coney Barrett is a ‘handmaid’; and on and on and on and on.
The MSM lies. All the time. Especially about anything relating to President Trump. And they are lying about polls that show a 10-point lead for Biden.
Americans can see with their own eyes what a Trump rally looks like and a Biden campaign event looks like. They can see what a vigorous healthy leader looks like, and a frail, forgetful, flustered old man looks like.
Most importantly, Americans are seeing the stakes of the 2020 election more clearly than ever in American history, and it’s not about personality or tweets. It’s about preserving America as founded.
Americans are going to turn out in record numbers to re-elect President Trump, and the margin will exceed the margin of Democrat cheating.
Turnout for Joe Biden will be like turnout for watching the NBA Finals—a small fraction of what the MSM narratives suggest it will be.
Eric Georgatos blogs at America Can We Talk?