Reports of Donald Trump’s political demise have been greatly exaggerated.
His polling is poor at a crucial stage of the US electoral cycle. To be fair it has never been good, but deeper analysis of polling shows Trump within a point of where he was in key battleground states in 2016 and we all know how that panned out.
The days of Joe Biden languishing in his basement in Wilmington, Delaware are fading fast. Biden’s minders had consigned the 77-year-old to a card table next to the hot water heater for much of the last three months. He has shown no willingness to take it up to Trump on a daily basis.
This is a deliberate tactic and speaks of how the Democrats want to run the campaign. They want the election on November 3 to be a referendum on Trump while the Republicans want this as a contest with both candidates stripped down and oiled up in the squared circle.
Election tactics
The thought of the two septuagenarians oiled up is made doubly amusing by the revelation in John Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, that Trump spends almost two hours in any given day in hair and make-up.
“Nurse! More orange!”
Biden’s strategy is not so much rope-a-dope as stick and move. Evade and elude. But that becomes increasingly difficult as the campaign moves to its denouement.
The Democrat National Convention begins next week. It was scheduled to be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of the key states Biden needs to win. Now, it might just easily be held on the North Pole. All the gang will be there albeit in virtual reality. It will be a digital party, a zoom-fest with speakers including Bernie Sanders, Michelle and Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Biden will wrap up the convention with his acceptance speech on Friday 20 August AET.
Today Biden named Kamala Harris as his running mate. Harris, a Californian senator, is a woman of immigrant parents, an Indian mother and a Jamaican father.
It will be Harris’s tenure as Attorney-General in California that should receive the bulk of media scrutiny. In 2011, a year after her election as the Golden State’s chief politician, the US Supreme Court declared the state’s prison system so overcrowded that it constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Harris continued to argue against sentence reduction and programs to reduce recidivism. It is worth noting that African-Americans make up around six per cent of the state’s population but 28.3 per cent of the state’s prison inmates. Black lives or certainly a big chunk of them in California did not seem to matter quite so much to Harris a decade ago.
The first of three presidential debates will take place a little over six weeks from today on 29 September. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani had approached the Biden camp seeking five debates but was politely told, “Just the three as agreed, thanks.” Giuliani’s ambit was an odd one, normally made by an aspirant with ground to make up rather than an incumbent. It reveals the whiff of desperation that has enveloped the Trump re-election team and the GOP in general.
The thought behind it is that Biden, a gaffe-prone speaker at the best of times, will make some horrendous mistake or some appalling misspeak in real time while the nation watches on. The more debates, the more likely it is that it will happen. Still, it is a double-edged sword because Trump is no stranger to the foot-in-mouth moment.
Take this from Monday when Trump addressed the media from the White House press room: “In 1917, they say, right, the great pandemic was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere between 50 million and 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War. All the soldiers were sick. That was a terrible situation.”
There is so much that is factually wrong in just those four sentences it is hard to know where to begin. But this is post-fact America after all. Trump’s base couldn’t care less how many strange remarks their president makes. In middle America, where it counts, Biden has more to lose from the debates. If voters are looking for a safe pair of hands, the former Vice President’s performance over the three debates where the small target strategy takes a holiday, will need to be impeccable.
Trump continues to be ascendant in one element of polling. A solid majority think he has better economic credentials than Biden and that he is more capable of a quick and successful economic rebuild in a post-pandemic phase. The Trump team will have and will continue to push Trump to make this his strength but keeping the POTUS on message is a near impossible task.
Once counting begins, observers of the election will know the result with a degree of certainty fairly quickly. It all comes down to Florida. If Florida turns blue, it is difficult to see how Trump can garner the 270 electoral college votes needed for victory. Florida has had no excuse mail-in voting for twenty years now. It has never slowed down the state publishing results.
The result in Florida is the key but in the other key swing state, Pennsylvania is providing no excuse mail in voting for the first time and its electoral administrators have already advised they may not have a count done by the evening of November 3.
That means, depending on the results, neither Trump nor Biden are likely to concede on election night. How long might it go before the result is known? Well, let’s just say, for every hour of doubt, America’s internal pressures will grow. There is a real risk of violent protest coming from people who are angry and/or heavily armed.
Eighty-three days out from polling day, Trump is pretty much where he was in the polls back in 2016. Back then, the US was emerging from the economic calamity of the GFC. Unemployment in double digits. Nine million homeowners had their mortgages foreclosed and lost their homes.
Now, four years later, it is much worse. There are 30 million Americans unemployed, nudging 20 per cent of the workforce. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the US harder than almost any country in the globe. Five million positive cases. By polling day, CDC modelling shows there may well be 300,000 dead.
And this time, Donald Trump is no untried, worth a shot, maverick candidate. Similarly, voters who found it easy to dislike and distrust Hillary Clinton have no real beef with Biden. He is a difficult man to hate.
Game on.
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