palletcentral

10 PalletCentral • September-October 2020 palletcentral.com POLICY PLAY AT L ast issue, I focused on the potential impact of a Biden presidency or continued Trump Presidency on the pallet industry. The effect on the pallet industry of this political election cycle goes far beyond just the Office of the President. The repercussions of a Biden Presidency, especially, would reverberate throughout the country. A Vice President Kamala Harris would be positioned to become President and make for a decades long run for the Democratic party. Charlie Cook notes, "If things go poorly, Republicans' 'farm team' could be decimated. As Democrats found out in 2010, a wipeout loss can reverberate for years." Cook is the editor and publisher of The Cook Political Report, and a political analyst for the National Journal. The following is Charlie Cook's analysis. The focus of political America the week of August 24 was on President Trump, not so much on the rest of the Republican Party. Indeed, the quadrennial national GOP confab this time was less a party convention than simply a virtual convening of Trump's base. In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted earlier in August, 49 percent of Republicans and independents who lean Republican reported considering themselves more supporters of Trump than of the Republican Party in general. As extraordinary as that seems, that figure is actually lower than the 52 to 54 percent who said the same thing in the NBC/ Wall Street Journal 's March, April, June, and July surveys (they skipped polling in May). The intensity of support for Trump (and opposition) cannot be overstated. It makes you wonder whether, when Trump leaves office either this coming January or in January 2025, he will hold his own annual conventions, akin to the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' meetings when Warren Buffett's devotees make their pilgrimage to Omaha. Going into the Republican convention, Joe Biden's lead over Trump was 7.6 points in the RealClearPolitics average and 9.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight weighted average of polls, the latter closer to the 10-point average lead we've been seeing in live telephone interview surveys. On August 24, the highly regarded Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg released a live telephone (mostly cell) poll of registered voters conducted for Democracy Corps. It showed Biden's lead at 10 points, 52 to 42 percent, in 16 key battleground states. There is a good reason for Republicans to be concerned, but not just at the top of the ticket. With virtually all of the political air in the room consumed by the battle for the White House and control of the Senate, there isn't much left for the 435 congressional, 11 gubernatorial, nine lieutenant-governor, 10 state-attorney- general, seven secretary-of-state, and 5,876 state legislative seats on the ballot this year. (Special elections boost the total even further.) With both the redistricting process and many of the details of the once-arcane world of election administration becoming increasingly partisan, who is sitting in a governor, state-attorney-general, or secretary-of-state office can matter a lot, to say nothing of who controls the state legislative chambers. Off to the Races! For the GOP, much more than the White House and Senate hangs in the balance. By Charlie Cook and Patrick Atagi iStockphoto.com/lucky-photographer

• Cover