The American Politics Thread

in case you haven't paid attention.. and it doesn't look like you have. It doesn't matter or not whether people are excited to vote for Biden... they are against Trump and that equates to the same damn thing. and the polling in 2020 merely reflects what we've already seen in 2018 with actual votes and results. About a +10% Democratic edge nationally.

The election is not about Biden.. it is a referendum on Trump as it was in 2018... as all midterms are.

so on that note.. take the celebration jive and stick it up your ass man.  No one is prematurely celebrating here..not me.. not anyone.. and I will.. everyone will get out to vote. I analyse politics.. I don't pontificate.  Every single bit of information and history, past and recent, that we are seeing out there is pointing to a Trump loss in 4 months. Potentially a landslide loss.  I am mainly pointing out why that is so. That is exactly why Trump is going to need something 2020ish to have any chance to win. If Democrats turn out..  Trump loses.  Democratic apathy and sitting at home which happened in 2016 isn't going to in 2020 and  isn't going to save Trump this time.. 

my question is.. what might.. and thinking out loud. That will mean a reason Democrats don't get out and vote.. and since they aren't voitng for Biden. but voting against Trump.. there is probably very little Biden can do to f**k this up.  Yet.. there is very little Trump can do.. if anything.. to turn around opinions baked into concrete over 3.5 years.. and a completely bungled virus and race response.

but at was best said.. by a writer I respect quite a bit.. consise and on point

I'd damn sure rather be where Biden is right now than where Trump is...  

I am not an American and my own feelings are not as overwhelmingly convinced of a Biden win as micky's.  And this is not just based on history or the polling but also, as a supplement, the convo I recently had with my cousins in IL, a state that's stayed blue in every election since 1992 and isn't remotely up for grabs this time.  They are like, "Of course we're going to vote against Trump but Biden is a terrible candidate" and they have been pretty much in SMFH off mode since the inauguration of 2017 so not like they are equivocating.  (To the others in this thread, this is me relaying what they told me so don't exhort them to do their duty and vote blue no matter what like you did the last time when I posted an analysis (not mine) of why Southern black voters chose Biden over Sanders in the primary. They're not on PA and they can't hear you.)  As you too can sense from this, enthusiasm for Biden is low and whether negative partisanship alone will turn the tide in a Presidential election remains to be seen.

Where I differ with you is in drawing on the history of strongmen to speculate on the 2020 election.  This would be true if Trump was a classic strongman.  But he's not.  He is a needy narcissist.  What do I base that on?  In March or so, Trump said, in those very words, that he was not responsible for the pandemic.  As a matter of civic duty alone, no President is supposed to say that but more to the point, no strongman will ever say that, whether or not out of a sense of duty.  It is fatal to the power of a strongman to admit to being powerless or openly refusing responsibility for something.  

We have a strongman here (and a good friend of Trump) and while (I hate to admit it) Modi did far, far better than Trump in handling the pandemic, he did make his share of costly mistakes including the dubious distinction of making India maybe the only country to head into a nationwide lockdown with a four hour notice; even the Gulf Sheikhs didn't go there! But what Modi never did was wash his hands off.  If anything, he chose the pandemic as the perfect moment to put the communal disharmony of the past few months behind him and reap rich political capital, exhorting the people to do as he said with the promise that everything would be ok if they did so.  No strongman would waste a crisis but Trump has.  He has somewhat retraced his steps but clumsily and keeps tripping over.  The election being so close at hand confuses his instincts.  He doesn't know whether he should spend more time on playing great unifier (for Modi, this was a no brainer and he is way more right wing culturally than Trump, make no mistake) or on baiting the white supremacists whose votes he badly needs.  And it shows.  

So, yes, it is true that in a crisis, a country turns to a strong leader as a port of shelter in a storm.  But Trump has not presented himself as a strong leader in this period, far from it.  This is where he has lost control.  And this is where what was once a five point lead for Biden has nearly doubled to nine-ten points. 

Lastly, on the polling.  It is important to look at polls discretely rather than generalise them because some are wildly optimistic while some which have been reliable predictors of a Trump/Trumpist win in the past can give a better indication of what is going on.  It's also important to look at battleground states polling than the overall lead which means next to nothing because of how the US Presidential election is fought.

Trafalgar's polls called Michigan in 2016.  They also predicted Ron De Santis' win in Florida in the mid terms.  What they specifically are saying in 2020 is, then, very important to look at. 

This time, they have Biden winning Michigan but by a much narrower margin than the other polls.  I would say for a June end-July poll, a 1% margin means almost nothing and we need to look at the numbers again in say September-October. But note that this was a state that Trump won last time so it's not good news for him that it's a dead heat this time.  

On similar lines, Florida is a dead heat as per Trafalgar's polls.  

They have Trump edging out Biden in Wisconsin.  But again, all three being states he won already. 

And here comes the biggest bad news for Trump.  EVEN Trafalgar has him losing by 5.3% to Biden in Pennsylvania.  That's nearly outside the margin for error.  The one pollster who has predicted Republican wins well before doesn't have Trump winning in Pennsylvania.  

We have yet to see polls from Arizona.  Which will be interesting because...

Biden doesn't look like losing any of the 220 odd votes HRC won in 2016.  Trump's polarizing tactics ensured that every state that went blue has only gone a deeper blue by 2020.  He did not attempt to win over any of them at all, and some states HRC won, she had won narrowly.  Whereas, on account of the same polarizing tactics, every state he won narrowly remains a tough fight in 2020.  Even the most reliable Republican pollster doesn't see a red wave in FL.  

So here's the upshot.  From 220-odd, Biden needs only 40 or so votes to get past the finish line.  If he gets ONLY PA and Arizona, he is very close to that line.  If he gets FL and PA, he is home, he doesn't even need Arizona.  Alternatively, FL and Arizona would get him past the line as well.  Texas and Georgia are longshots at this point, but any upsets there and Trump is toast. 

That is, no, Biden may not have to win back the entire blue wall that was lost in 2016.  He could win at best a couple of the states and pick up AZ and be home and dry.  Is it conceivable that he could win AZ, PA and Michigan in addition to the states that accounted for the 220 odd votes of 2016?  Yes.  More conceivable than Trump winning every state that is polling narrowly for or against him as of today.  BECAUSE Trump has to win many more of these narrow states to get to 267 than Biden.  

By no means is it a lock for Biden and it is likely that the trends in his favour aren't quite as strong as the polls ( in general and not the Trafalgar polls) make it out to be.  But is a Trump win assured or the more likely possibility at least as you seem to suggest?  No.  That too doesn't seem to be the case. The problem is barring a very few, Trump supporters themselves have gone out of their way to be obnoxious about the win and hoping and practically salivating at the prospect of liberal tears in 2020.  The problem with that scenario being Trump's win in 2016 was narrow and swung specifically by a few states where he notched up razor thin margins of victory.  When you have won a precarious coalition, you need to invest efforts in building and consolidating it.  This is what Trump has not done nor have his supporters, be they regular Joes wearing MAGA hats or Republican/Fox operatives.  They loved to laugh at the smugness of liberals who were in for a rude shock in 2016 but they have now themselves occupied a smug position that is at odds with the electoral realities.  And it may be too late now to make amends.  There are limitations to a low base-high turnout strategy and that, more than anything, may be what hurts Trump in 2020.  Emphasis on MAY.  I don't know anything about this as of today.  But if we get to October and Biden is still leading healthily in at least three of the battleground states I mentioned, Trump is toast. 

It is strange for us too here in India because we have a parliamentary system where parties win control of the Lower House (called Lok Sabha here) and then appoint a party member from within as Prime Minister.  In practice, charismatic leaders from a party get the party to work for them and become bigger than it (Nehru, Indira Gandhi, now Modi). But yes, the public has no say in specifically who will be the PM candidates of the parties in a given election.  This is how it is in UK, Aus, Canada, etc.  There is good and bad to both systems and, as you say, given the power the US President is bestowed with, a direct election becomes necessary to make sure the control is exercised by the person the people (or a plurality of them) wanted.  Or a plurality of state votes, but whatever.

1. The course of the pandemic in November. Is it going to be worse than it is now? Are voters that aren't given mail-in options going to risk a visit to the voting booth? Will there be enough voting booths available for all voters? Take recent primaries in Georgia and Wisconsin for instance.

2. Election meddling. Russia, China, and Iran are the known meddlers at this time. For those states that could go one way or the other, an effective hacking could be the decider on which candidate gets the state. Imagine the resulting turmoil once the news of this is made public. I don't doubt Russia's ability to pull this off at this time. They already have the puppet they wanted in office and I don't think they're going to give up so easily on his re-election. As always, I hope I'm wrong, but it's difficult to ignore the warnings of the intelligence community and McConnell's blocking of election security bills in the Senate.

I still find him a fine story-teller, especially his early years.  There are other authors I enjoy despite their actual leanings politically, such as Kipling, Lovecraft and e e cummings.  And as a visual artist, Dali, for that matter.