Came across this article and it resonates with a lot of what I’m seeing in this and other threads on this board. Quote:
Were it not for the PTSD of election night 2016, everyone in politics would be saying confidently that Trump’s grotesquely bad poll numbers are just the logical denouement of a presidency undone by either malice or incompetence, depending on the day. But 2016!, is the tiresome retort. The boring reality is that Trump won a margin-of-error race between two historically disliked candidates, in hindsight the equivalent of a .300 hitter getting on base with a dinky single into left field. He has no magical powers.
To be clear, this article does point to a potential weak spot for Biden: that many polls show a majority of voters trusting Trump over Biden on managing the economy. Even that advantage, however, is a) by no means carved in stone, and b) not necessarily destined to be the most salient come election day.
Right. What people keep forgetting is that everything had to go right for Trump in 2016 and he still won by only 77,000 votes spread across three states. The black vote went down. Clinton didn’t campaign strategically. Comey happened at the last minute. Lots of little things coalesced so that all the pieces fell his way. And he still lost the popular vote.
True, he now has the power of incumbency and the 24/7 bullhorn it gives him. He has a base that is intensely loyal. He has all the Republican officials in the country trying to suppress Democratic voting. He has almost four months to do something that sticks besides death totals.
It’s not 2016. 2020 is a new world. The horror brought in a revolution I never thought I’d live to see. Hitting bottom was in sight and people said, no way. Remember when Obama said hope and change? That didn’t happen. It’s happening now. Celebrate that, no matter what else the future brings.
How many people care about the betting sites? Never see anyone talk about them except on this site. And I watch a lot of news and visit news websites a lot.
Does anybody else recall a story a week or two prior to the 2016 election about a British (maybe Irish) bookmaker paying out on “Clinton Wins” bets because it was a foregone conclusion?
Oh yeah. Here’s one of the handful of articles “after the fact”. Most articles that I found were written around 10/18/2016 when the bookmakers first made that call.
Interesting, though I note you said that these were the friends you “still had contact with,” so how many people are you talking about here, compared to the number you cut off before this for their unwavering loyalty to Trump?
I’m expecting a nationally televised baptism for Orange POUTS around October. It’ll be in a mega-church for a combined Jim Bakker-type/MAGA rally. Evangelicals grab snakes, the base gets turned on to shades of burnt Sienna while the white supremacists gear up with a night of dog whistles.
I don’t know. I hope you’re right. But don’t forget Trump’s base is “dumb people”. And there are plenty of them. I see this when I read social media posts online or go out to my inlaws in the country. They believe that Biden is “not all there mentally”. They think voting Democrat is going to cause the nation’s entire law enforcement apparatus to be dismantled and allow criminals, anarchists, communists, violent leftists, and minorities (who they have “nothing against” but can’t understand why they can’t just pick themselves up by their boot straps like everyone else) to run amok. They think voting for Biden will usher in a new age of “#wokeness” where everything they say and do will be scrutinized and Harriet Tubman is the only historical figure appropriate to name anything after.
Or they’re basically just “dumb assholes”. They like Trump because he likes the things they like (making money, grabby pussy, talking shit to anyone who they disagree with) and hates the things they hate (minorities, immigrants, people who tell them to stop acting like dumb assholes).
I mean the fact that every poll everywhere isn’t overwhelmingly in favor of Biden is troubling.
All my (suburban) Republican friends and family pretty much hate Trump now and intend to vote for Biden, and they all voted Trump in 2016. Because they didn’t think he would be that bad. They thought he’d start acting presidential. They thought he’d moderate the rhetoric and rely on mainstream Republicans to set policy. And a couple of them just didn’t like Hillary. But Trump was such a long shot they thought they could vote for him and still get President Clinton without having to pull the lever for her.
Trump needs some things to go right to have a realistic shot (at a free and fair election).
He needs to get COVID-19 under control, which is something he still can do, but he’s running out of time, and I don’t mean that he has until November, either. School openings may end up being the knockout punch. Right now we’re just dealing with COVID. In the fall, we’ll be dealing with COVID, the flu, the cold season, measles, and possibly much more.
He needs the economy to recover. This is still possible, but it won’t happen unless he gets COVID under control, and worse, I don’t think we’ve truly reckoned with how bad the damage is and how bad it’s going to be. Renters are starting to get evicted. Businesses are starting to collapse. Demand is way, way down. Savings are depleted. And we’ve got massive, massive deficits that were already bad but are now completely unsustainable. I think the knockout punch will come in the fall when investors finally wake up.
However, I could be wrong on both accounts, and the situation could somehow improve.
One thing Biden and Democrats will have to pay a little more attention to is rising violent crime, which has been surging the last few months, particularly since the Floyd protests. I think some of the crime wave is a natural product of a lock-down and its resulting unemployment, but toppling statues and calls to abolish the police could create an adverse perception about Democrats if they’re not careful. In any case, I fully expect the right wing to exploit rising crime on racial grounds to scare white suburban voters.
The RW media + Trump’s advertising + the rest of the R party messaging has created this exact D strawman. I’m a solid D and frankly I’d be voting for the other guys if I actually believed that strawman represented the true D platform.
There are a lot of people who buy that stuff and they are existentially terrified of the Ds winning. If we can’t break into their hermetically sealed messaging bubble and inject some reality to trigger some questioning, those folks are lost forever.
You/we have to get over this idea that if only we can present the right facts/arguments, the scales will fall away and Trump’s supporters will see him for who he truly is. They already know who he is (or close enough to satisfy themselves) and political persuasion doesn’t work that way. Trying to persuade a hostile party usually ends up further entrenching them in their mistaken beliefs. These voters need to bring themselves out of the bubble; they won’t be coaxed or shamed out.
It depends on why people are voting. If they are voting because they like their guy, then you are right. But if you are apathetic about your candidate to begin with and are only voting to make sure the other guy doesn’t get in, then seeing your favored candidate as a shoo-in then you may decide to stay home of vote third party to “send a message”,
This is what happened to Clinton. If apathetic Democrats had actually thought that there was actually a danger that Trump could actually win, I think more would have shown up.
This is the scenario that really scares me. Biden can be up 12 points in the polls, but if Democratic voters don’t to show up due a rational fear of Covid-19 in crowded urban polling stations, while Republicans, don’t have that fear due to their living in more rural locations and downplaying the danger of the virus, Trump could easily pull off a massive upset.
Republicans know this and are going to do everything in their power to make voting as dangerous as possible.
