After bombing with predictions on Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan's demise this spring, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick returned to prophet mode on Thursday when he assured fellow Republicans that Donald Trump was on track for an overwhelming victory over "laughing lady" Kamala Harris in November.
But several polls that were released this week gave the impression that Patrick might be out of touch with the presidential contest's rapidly-changing dynamics in a race that has Trump and Harris running neck-and-neck just days after she took the torch from President Biden when he dropped out of the race.
A New York Times/Sienna poll that was made public on Thursday night showed Trump clinging to a 1 point lead after leading Biden by 6 percentage points in a survey they conducted earlier this month. A Marist poll for NPR and PBS this week showed Trump up on his new Democratic foe by a single point while he led her by 2 points in surveys that Quinnipiac University and Morning Consult conducted this week.
Trump had a 3-point edge this week in polls for CNN and CBS News. Trump had a lead of less than 2.4 percentage points on average in eight major independent polls that were taken since Biden's exit from the contest on Sunday. But the ex-president's advantage was outside the margin of error in only one poll since that time thanks to a Rasmussen survey that showed with a 7-point lead as a dramatic outlier.
That - to the Texas lieutenant governor's dismay - means that Trump and Harris are statistically tied heading into the final 100 days of the Republican's third consecutive election as the presidential nominee.
Patrick predicted repeatedly for months that Phelan would lose to a Trump-backed challenger in the most expensive primary fight ever waged for the Legislature in the Lone Star State. Trump parroted Patrick's forecast before the Texas speaker embarrassed them both and others on the far right with a runoff win in May.
Patrick explained why he's so certain Trump will prevail in a pair of interviews this week with right-wing media outlets.
The Texas Senate president said the voters face a clear-cut choice this fall.
"it's time for America to decide about what kind of country we're gonna be," Patrick said on the Chris Salcedo show on Thursday. "A country of laughing, silly, ridiculous, lying Kamala Harris who'd been a disaster at vice president? Or do you want to have sanity and common sense brought to America - and that's Donald J. Trump."
Patrick, who was never challenged throughout a 10-minute interview with Saucedo, set himself up for mockery when he asserted that voters must decide whether they "want our country run by TikTok or the U.S. Constitution."
Patrick didn't mention, however, that his own largest contributor in 2024 has been the leading investor in TikTok - the video hosting platform that's owned by a Chinese company and Republicans suspect to be a front for communist spying on unwitting Americans. Governor Greg Abbott has taken $10 million since December from the same Pennsylvania investor who has a $40 billion stake in the TikTok parent company.
The top TikTok financier - Pennsylvania resident Jeff Yass - donated $750,000 to Patrick in March and April. Yass has given Abbott almost $10.3 million since December - the largest sum of money ever raised at the state level from an individual donor here by far in a singular election season.
Abbott insists the largess from Yass is based simply on his support for school choice in Texas. But the governor hasn't said anything about TikTok as a Chinese spying portal since its top investor emerged as his number one donor by far in the past eight months.
Patrick's most bizarre claim this week arguably centered on his attempt in a Newsmax interview to make a case with lines from the Bible to demonstrate how he knows that Trump's survival from an assassination attempt almost two weeks ago was an act of God. Patrick said God has had his hand on Trump and saved his life after the campaign rally shooting for an overriding purpose. Patrick said voters could understand for themselves by reading Jeremiah 39-18 and Ephesians 6-11 in the Old Testament.
"There's so many scriptures that tie into this," Patrick said. "Anyone who doesn't believe it was divine intervention just doesn't believe in the creator."
more to come ...
