Another problem for Trump is that a lot of people polled are voting against Trump rather than for Biden. So it’s not enough to make Biden look like less than an angel, Trump needs to convince a lot of women, suburban voters and college-educated voters that Biden is so incredibly bad that you need to revise your negative opinion of Trump in comparison. That’s a heavy lift (especially when the best they seem to have is sad hand-wringing about Sanders and AOC).
There’s a nice insight in a Vox piece today:
[Biden] is executing a careful, quiet campaign focused less on thrilling his partisans than denying Trump the boogeyman he needs to reenergize his base. It’s a campaign that frustrates liberal activists and pundits because it repeatedly, routinely denies them the excitement and collisions that structure modern politics. It’s also, for that reason, a campaign that is frustrating Trump and Fox News, which is why they keep trying to run against Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar instead.
I think this goes along with what Jophiel says above, that people are voting more against Trump than for Biden, and Trump can’t flip that dynamic because everyone knows Biden just isn’t a very polarizing or controversial guy. With Hillary out of the picture — how Trump must secretly wish she were still around — the best Trump can do to tar Biden is to associate him with Sanders and AOC, but the left know the connection is bullshit, and not that many on the right are being taken in by it either.
This is actually the thing I think could break in Trump’s favor. Not that COVID will disappear, but that the most optimistic scenario for the Oxford vaccine comes true, and Americans really are getting vaccinated by September/October. Whether that’s enough to make them forget how disastrous our response was, or every other terrible thing about Trump, remains to be seen (or not.)
There is not a chance that the Oxford vaccine will be mass-produced before the election. According to tonight’s news, it might be available to the most vulnerable by the beginning of the year and to the whole country in the spring.
Just in time for Biden’s inauguration. 
Putting the pandemic behind us - medically and scientifically, not through a “miracle” - would be a very nice start to the Biden Administration.
Why Trump’s foe isn’t Biden but the pandemic… and he’s losing badly: Can Trump convince skeptical 2020 voters that he's qualified for reelection? | CNN Politics
Expect incessant whinging from Trump about how Biden is getting all the credit for “my” (i.e., Trump’s) vaccine.
“Because I’m not getting the credit I deserve, I am instructing Betsy DeVos to cut all federal education funding to Oxford University!”
My understanding is that it is already being mass produced in hopes that it’ll be approved. Sites I’m seeing with just a little googling are saying at least a million doses by September, which I’d agree isn’t mass-produced for the purposes of a global pandemic. But I’m less clear on how quickly they are thinking they’d ramp up after that.
I found your linked article confusing. If a million doses will be ready in September but high-risk patients won’t get it until December, then who are the September doses for?
The article also says: Overall, Dixon said while Hill’s December timeline is “possible,” it is “on the optimistic side of things.” Vaccines never get done early. While I’ll cheer for December I won’t expect it.
Way back in post #63, I did refer to this as ‘the most optimistic scenario.’ That said, I myself am slightly unclear on what that timeline actually is, both in terms of the production schedule as well as the schedule of who they’re being distributed to.
People were saying that things looked good for Hillary, but if you looked at actual numbers she really wasn’t doing that good. People talked like she was a shoe-in, but 538 (to use the most prominent example) only gave her a 2/3 chance of victory, and other polls showed potential issues that people ignored. I don’t remember things looking great for Kerry either, you’re probably biased by the fact that you were hanging out with a crowd who was excited enough about him to throw a party. I remember him being a flop of a candidate going up against an incumbant, and while he tried to run against Bush’s biggest disaster (the Iraq war), the fact that Kerry had voted in favor of the war made this a hard sell.
OK - you and others have convinced me that my recollection is faulty, and that my “expectations” in those 2 elections were colored by my hopes and fears. I still consider the outcomes in 04 and 16 just horrible disappointments - for me and the country.
Couldn’t believe enough of my fellow citizens would re-elect a moron who had lied us into a war. And couldn’t imagine enough folk would vote for the current embarrassment. Or - on the other side - that enough sensible folk wouldn’t turn out to prevent either result.
Of course - hell - in 00 Gore couldn’t even carry Tenn! 
By voting in a moron who voted for the war like most establishment Democrats, but came up with absurd excuses after the fact to explain that the vote to authorize war wasn’t REALLY a vote to authorize the war? The Democrats were not the opposition to the Iraq war, they were all happy to vote for it, and only became unhappy when it was a disaster? The Democrats really messed up by flag-waving for the Iraq war and voting almost down the line to authorize it, because aside from it being a horrible idea morally, legally, and diplomatically, it utterly killed the ability of the Democratic party to position themselves as in opposition to the Republicans on one of the largest issues of the 21st century.
The Democrats did not vote “almost down the line” for the Iraq War (the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002). In the House, over 60% of Democratic Representatives voted against the AUMF (81 for, 126 against, 1 not voting). By contrast, in the Republican House caucus the vote was 215 for, 6 against, and 2 not voting–over 96% in favor of the AUMF, which really is “almost down the line”.
Democrats in the Senate were significantly more hawkish, and a majority of Senate Democrats voted to authorize the war (29 for, 21 against, so 58% of Democrats in the Senate voted for the war). That’s still not “almost down the line”, especially not in contrast to Senate Republicans, who voted 48 to 1 (nearly 98%) in favor of the war.
The Republicans were “almost down the line”; the Democrats were badly divided.
Man - I know it. Check the threads and see who was truly opposed to the was back then. It was a damned lonely position. As annoying as it was to have people - public and private - reimagine their position, I kept hoping that at SOME point we’d have had enough.
And IMO it is better for someone to change their mind at some point - even if not fully admitting that they are doing so, than to insist on a foolish consistency.
I really don’t understand what you are saying, or whether you are disagreeing with anything in particular that I’ve said. I’m not saying Kerry was unblemished - or inspiring. But he sure as hell didn’t have the initiation of that horrible war and the passage of the Patriot Act having taken place under his watch as President.
2004 was shockingly close for an incumbent “wartime” president.
Trump has none of anything Bush had going for him. Either Biden starts drooling all over the place, or Trump’s gonna have to steal it. Oh, or riots.
Riots are something we will have aplenty if Trump is reelected. Riots that will make what happened recently pale in comparison.
If Biden wins the Trumpets will threaten and make noise about riots. I doubt much will come of it. Maybe a few Eric Rudolph/Timothy McVeigh dickless loser types will come out of the woodwork but no riots.
I’m saying that Kerry was trying to run as an opposition candidate to things that he had voted for as a Senator. It’s more than just ‘not inspiring’, it was an absurd and pathetic position for him to take, much center his campaign identity on. Kerry wasn’t a stark contrast to Bush, however much he wanted to paint himself that way, and people saw through it. While there was plenty of opposition to Bush, as someone who had supported the worst of Bush’s decisions he couldn’t harness that opposition to fuel his campaign very well.
Going back to the current election, Biden has been solidly opposed to Trump in a great many areas, and especially in his major disasters (COVID response, corruption in office, and racial tensions to name a few). While there are certainly plenty of criticisms one can make of Biden, he has definitely not spent the last four years rubber stamping for Trump. There are certainly ways he can fail, but being perceived as ‘not any different from Trump’ really isn’t one of them.
That’s literally true, but only because he was never president. He had the initiation of that horrible war and the passage of the Patriot act having taken place with his vote of approval while he was in the Senate. The fact that he actively supported both of those disasters with the power he had in the 2000-2004 timeframe made it hard to take seriously his claim that he would fight them hard if we gave him more power in 2004-2008.
OK, that’s a fair point. The core of the party supported it, as seen by the fact that everyone who got or was a serious contender for president or vice president who had the opportunity to vote for the war did, but ‘down the line’ is not an accurate summary of the vote.