(A), I don’t live in a “smallish flyover town.” I live in Fayetteville, NC, with a population of over 500,000 in the metropolitan area (including Ft. Bragg).
(2), There is no reason why there should be some massive resurgence of COVID. I know you desperately want and need there to be one because you think it finally gives you something that will help defeat President Trump, but it (the resurgence) isn’t going to happen. The virus has done most of what it is going to do. There might be a resurgence if the entire country was coming out of quarantine, but we are not. Many states had no formal stay-at-home orders, and ones that did have them, like mine, were only pretend; as I said earlier, people were out and about constantly the entire time, going to Walmart, home improvement stores, etc.
Finally, to the extent that people do remember, and vote based on, COVID, later, it won’t affect President Trump; it will affect their governors and mayors. Most people do not see the actions or inactions of President Trump as affecting their day-to-day lives. It is their governors and mayors that closed their businesses, closed their nail and hair salons, closed their barbershops, closed their churches (but let the used-car lots and liquor stores stay open) long past when there was any hospital-space-based need for it. It is their governors and mayors that will get blamed for still not allowing these businesses to open now. They will get the brunt of voter wrath if any, not President Trump.
Interesting. Just be careful about extrapolating your experiences to the whole. I’m likely guilty of that as well. But here’s my anecdotal info from my family and friend contacts in rural Ohio: while there’s still some relatives and friends who say they support Trump, most won’t say they support him.
They talk about things like “character”, “faith”, “respect” without explicitly saying anything about the president. This is a bad sign for Trump. There’s going to be a lot of people who vote for someone who’s not the incumbent president, even if they don’t tell anyone. And I know two relatives who’ve told me they changed their registration from R to D (both women over 50). That is not good for Republicans.
Now maybe Ohio is different because the governor is Republican and he’s handled the pandemic response well enough that they know how incompetent the federal response is. I don’t know.
I also know several former Trump supporters in SoCal who say they’re fed up with him because of his pandemic failures. They know people who got sick and how serious it is. But California is very different from the rest of the union.
Thanks to the fact that articles are no longer written in the inverted pyramid style (making the main point up-front), you have to plow through a lot of blather to get to this point, which I think is correct:
The private sector can’t do it all! People need government to work for them. This is what Biden and the Dems have to emphasize. Not what an SOB trump is–that didn’t work for Hillary and it won’t work this time. Everyone (even the Republicans) know he’s an SOB. Change the subject already! This crisis has shown how important a responsible, organized, unified, competent federal government is.
I bolded THE most important thing: “…as everyone knows, even if Biden wins, it’s worth little unless the Democrats can retake the Senate.” Otherwise it’s four more years of deadlock.