Some of the things to consider:
trump has done nothing to appeal to a broad range of American voters. Any administrative successes he's had revolve around unpopular actions - a massive tax cut for the super-rich that only benefited Wall Street, an aggressive push to build a border wall against Mexico, a harsh anti-immigration program that has punished families and children especially - or relied on a strong economy that was never that strong in the first place thanks to trump's tariff wars and failures to respond to the current pandemic.
In one of the odder things hurting trump now is the one thing trump relied on to win the Republican primaries and eke out an Electoral College win that November: Racism is now hurting trump at a time it's the only thing he's got. To quote David A. Graham at The Atlantic:
As pollsters are at pains to point out, polls are snapshots and not forecasts; Biden’s lead could dissipate, though this race has been unusually stable so far. Contrary to Trump’s protestations, Biden’s lead as it exists now is real—and given how hard it has been for anything to dent Trump’s carapace, it’s worth examining closely. Stranger still, the impetus appears to be race—something that has been both Trump’s Achilles’ heel and his secret weapon throughout his political career. For some reason, it’s affecting his political standing differently than it has before...
...Polls have consistently shown that Americans disapprove of his response to protests of police violence and believe that he has worsened race relations. In the New York Times/Siena poll, race relations (33 percent) and the protests (29 percent) are the only areas where issue approval lags behind his overall vote preference. In the Harvard/Harris poll, the same two areas earn Trump his worst marks of any issue, though they are still slightly higher than his expected vote.
Voters are right that Trump is worsening race relations and handling the protests poorly. In the past two days alone, the president has retweeted (and then deleted) a video of one of his supporters shouting “White power!” and another of two white supporters pointing guns at black protesters marching past their house...
But why? Perhaps it’s just a matter of what issues are most important to voters right now. There’s always been a sizable contingent of reluctant or conflicted Trump supporters. In 2016 exit polls, only 35 percent of voters said Trump had the temperament to be president, but he won 46 percent of the popular vote. These voters are a familiar staple of news coverage too—the ones who preface their support with “I don’t always like the way he phrases it” or “I wish he would tone it down a little, but …” Until now, these voters may have been able to overlook Trump’s other flaws because he was getting done things they liked. But the pandemic has frozen progress on nearly all of Trump’s policy priorities, insofar as they were still alive anyway. Even if voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, it’s no longer much of a positive benefit. And the profusion of news coverage has made issues of race impossible to ignore.
Alternatively, perhaps voters are shifting not just their priorities but their views. As the political scientist Michael Tesler writes, there’s evidence of real shifts in public opinion on race over the past six weeks or so. While views on policing are moving in response to a wide range of incidents, it’s clear that the Floyd case—brutal, senseless, and captured in excruciating clarity on video—has captured white attention in a way other deaths at the hands of police have not...
trump is losing voters among the groups who looked past his earlier racist antics or thought his being in the White House could temper his views. As trump's behavior worsened, however, it seems to have woken a growing number of those who were on the fence to jump off. Given how trump will continue to attack with racism and division, those numbers should get worse for him.
trump's national polling has always wavered in the low 40s, barely ever reaching 50 percent except in various Far Right trackers (and even then not for long). trump's appeal at a state-by-state level hasn't been on that hot either, and considering he's only in the White House due to a state-focused and broken-as-hell Electoral College system, trump does not have any good numbers at all.
Earlier I wrote the only number that mattered was trump's Republican Base: As long as he was as popular with them (in the high 80s-mid-90s) the party leadership wasn't going to do a thing to rein him in (it did not help the Republicans that they wanted a lot of it done anyway because they personally profited from it all).
Today the dynamic is different. To win a general election across enough states to secure the Electoral College, trump has to appeal to the middle-of-the-road, Independent voters to counter the numerical advantages Democrats have. Again, trump has done NOTHING that would appeal to the moderate middle voter set. Where he beat Hillary among No-Party/Indy voters 46-42 percent in the 2016 exit polls, he's trailing Biden with that voter group by about 21 points in the 2020 polls.
This is the other thing hurting trump: Biden is a genuinely more likable figure. Not just a more likable figure than trump - duh - but also a more likable figure than Hillary back in 2016. Where all the negative press Hillary accrued over 25 years as a public figure hurt her, Biden has no such disadvantage even with having a longer public career (and even with a number of faux pas on Biden's resume).
If we can look to what Stanley Greenberg says at The Atlantic about Biden's chances:
But this moment is very different. To start, during the summer and fall of 2016, Clinton never had the kind of national poll lead that Biden now has. She led by an average of four points four months before the election and the same four points just before Election Day. This year, after Biden effectively clinched the nomination, he moved into an average six-point lead over Trump, which has grown to nearly 10 points after the death of George Floyd and the weeks of protests that have followed. The lingering apprehension among Democrats fails to recognize just how much the political landscape has changed since 2016. We are looking at different polls, a different America, and different campaigns with different leaders...
The Clinton campaign’s worst blunder came in September 2016, when the candidate described “half of Trump’s supporters” as “deplorables” and walked right into the white working-class revolt against elites. Her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders had exposed a lack of enthusiasm for her in white working-class suburbs that Barack Obama had won. Her campaign hoped to make up for the lost votes with landslide wins among women, voters of color, and voters in big cities. White working-class voters noticed the lack of respect, and Trump ran up startling margins with them: He won these men by 48 points and women by 27, according to exit polls...
While Biden has said some gaffe-quality stuff about trump's voting base, the media's attempt to float it as a campaign-breaker went nowhere. For one, it happened far too early in 2020 and for another we've had four years to see that Hillary was right. Back to Greenberg:
But much more important than all of that is the sustained, unwavering, and extremely well-documented opposition of the American people to every element of Donald Trump’s sexist, nativist, and racist vision. Indeed, the public’s deep aversion to Trumpism explains why Biden has such a poll lead...
This is where my evaluation of Biden being a Passive-Positive character is going to be a boon to the Democratic Party. Biden's congenial and likable nature on the national stage can help keep that poll lead well into November.
There's a reason why trump and his Republican allies were so desperate to stir up fake scandals against Biden like forcing Ukraine to lie about investigating Biden's son for business dealings there. They were and still are hoping to swiftboat/mudsling Biden down to trump's level of known corruption and vulgarity.
I also wrote a long time ago about first-termers running for re-election back in 2012 when Obama was doing it. As long as the incumbent is genuinely popular with the majority of voters, the incumbent should win. trump is nowhere near genuine popularity and never has been.
So as I said at the beginning of this article, trump has no honest way to win the election in 2020.
Which is why we have every reason to believe trump and his Republican buddies are gonna cheat like hell. Via David Smith at The Guardian:
(Bill) Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark website and director of the advocacy organisation Defending Democracy Together, said in an interview: “The special circumstances with Trump are his total abandonment of any constraints and even more important, perhaps, his having people around him who’ve abandoned any constraints on the way in which they’ll use the federal government, the executive branch, to say things, do things, pretend to do things.
“Richard Nixon did a little of that in 1972, and of course presidents always tout good news in the months before the election. But this time, it’s the degree to which you could have a real sustained effort to suppress minority voting and not make it easy for young people to vote..."
Voter suppression has haunted US elections for decades but the pandemic presents Trump with new opportunities. States are seeking a massive expansion of mail-in ballots so people do not have risk their health by queuing and voting in person. The president has intensified claims that this will lead to widespread cheating, even though several studies have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare...
His wild words are often backed by organizational muscle and action. The Republican National Committee has devoted $20m to opposing Democratic lawsuits across the country seeking to expand voting. Republicans are also reportedly aiming to recruit up to 50,000 people in 15 key states to serve as poll watchers and challenge the registration of voters they believe are ineligible.
Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York, said: “What we’re seeing in some primary states is the closures of polling places in African American dominated areas and mistaken purging of Democrats from the voter rolls. Some of this is anecdotal, but it is worrying all the same. And it will, no doubt, continue through the general election...”
What the Republicans are bound to do is reduce the turnout and discourage voters from showing at all, which gives the more extremist voters eager to do it - which favors the Far Right - more power at the ballot box. By shutting down polling precincts in poor and clearly minority communities - especially Blacks who vote as a 90-95 percent bloc for Democrats - they're definitely discouraging turnout.
The closer the GOP can make the numbers between trump and Biden, the likelier they can flip the mid-sized battleground states like Michigan (and big ones like Florida) same as they did against Hillary in 2016, and steal another Electoral College "victory" even if Biden gets 50 percent of the popular vote with a 6-8 million advantage over the less-loved trump.
This is where voter turnout is the one big key for Democrats and Left-leaning voters (and the sizabler anti-trump voting bloc that's grown since 2016). The only way to beat voter suppression is to show up and force your vote through. The best way to stop the Republicans from playing their rigged game of demographics and gerrymandering is to give Biden such leads in enough states that there's no way it will get "too close to call." They can't rig the machines enough to undercount or misvote every pro-Biden check that gets plugged in. They can't hide it if 500,000 people vote for Biden and pretend it was 250,000. There's only so much the GOP can do before enough people take notice and do something about it.
Get the damn vote out, America. To every anti-trump out there, this is your chance to throat-punch that Shitgibbon. To every Liberal, every Progressive, time to realize you're in the same damn boat and vote with unity. To every person horrified by trump's hatred and sexism, rise up and be counted, dammit.
Don't let the polls distract you. They should motivate us to show up and fulfill the hopes those polls are asking for. OUR NUMBERS MATTER. Let's do this.
1 comment:
The way covid is heating up, it looks like it will be ugly.
But the extent to which folks who are well aware of the danger are willing to come out to protest blatant injustice is encouraging.
And the primary voting is starting to remind me of 2012, when all kinds of voter suppression led to hours long lines of folks determined to cast their ballots, and handed Obama the second highest vote tally in our history.
It's that same grim determination that will pull us over the finish line, if we indeed make it there.
I'm in California and I vote by mail, so I'm a little bit out of the fray... Biden would carry California in the face of video evidence that he barbecued babies... but you know what? Biden is a fundamentally decent guy, and that above all else is what I hope people get out and vote for.
Fergus has really been an education in the importance of character in the presidency, and the ultimate irony for him and his will be if the coat tail effect takes down Mitch McConnell, the most amoral prick in politics, in the process.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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