Tempting to put faith in polls, however …

It is so tempting for those of us who want Donald Trump to get his head handed to him at the ballot box this November to place faith in all those polls showing him trailing Joe Biden by double digits.

Then again, these polls only serve to remind us of a painful truth about Trump, which is that he might be the luckiest — even with his utter incompetence and unfitness — politician in U.S. history.

I am forced to remind myself that Hillary Rodham Clinton also held big leads against Trump in the early summer of 2016. She enjoyed the backing of every major newspaper in the country. Pundits across the board predicted not just a Clinton win, but a possible landslide win at that!

Then it happened. Trump committed an act of proverbial political thievery by capturing three swing states that had voted twice for Barack Obama: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He won all three by a combined vote of 77,000 ballots and with them earned enough Electoral College votes to be elected president of the United States.

So, as tempting as it is to believe that Trump is in trouble politically in 2020 as he seeks re-election, I must reel in my enthusiasm.

I want Joe Biden to win this election. He wasn’t my first choice among Democrats. My initial hope was that the party would find a “sleeper,” a new voice among the huge field to back for the nomination. It didn’t pan out.

The former VP is now the presumptive nominee. He is beginning to clear his throat and is speaking with clarity and conviction about why we need to evict Trump and his cabal from the People’s House.

Circumstances have handed Biden some tailor-made issues on which to run: the pandemic, and George Floyd’s tragic death have produced hideous responses from Donald Trump. The economy has flat-lined as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. Trump has failed miserably to rise to the level of leader. He is unable or unwilling to assume the role of Consoler in Chief. He has become instead the Numbskull in Chief with his idiotic posturing on the pandemic and then on how he favors unleashing “thousands of heavily armed” active-duty military personnel to put down peaceful protests against police brutality.

None of that guarantees a Joe Biden victory. Indeed, the former vice president has to pay attention to the political landscape and avoid giving away an election as Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

The polling data looks promising. However, it is far too early in this game to get excited about what it is telling us.