The 2020 campaign isn’t marked by much movement in the polls.
Joe Biden has been ahead all year by anywhere from 5-10 points. The margin has been increasing, as Trump has acted like every suburban housewife’s abusive ex-.
Yet to read Lefty Twitter, you would be certain Trump is going to be President this time next year.
Uh, no. My guess is he won’t even be alive. When he realizes he’s going to be held to account, I suspect, he’ll take the coward’s way out.
Trump wants to steal the election, and is threatening a coup, because he knows he has lost.
But he can’t steal the election. Elections are handled by states, which pass the work to counties. Most election officials, especially at the lower level, are non-partisan. There are Jim Crow states that have been weaponized against the Democratic Party. My home state of Georgia is one.
But it’s nowhere near what Trump needs to win. Democrats could even win Georgia. That’s because the Democratic Party here, as well as FairFight Action, the group formed by my Kirkwood neighbor Stacey Abrams, are on top of this shit. When people are removed from the rolls because of a made-up “inactive” status, they re-enroll. Counties with lots of Democrats, and most suburban Atlanta counties are now like this, are determined to run a fair contest.
There are fantasies about Trump getting state legislatures Republicans control, like Pennsylvania, to slow the vote count and declare Trump the winner, then have a partisan Supreme Court do likewise. That’s not going to happen. State officials aren’t going to the mat for this bozo. Once a judge is appointed, Trump’s call on their personal loyalty ends. These people are still Americans.
That’s the main point. Most Republicans are still Americans. That means in a close-run contest they’re going to lean their thumbs down for the Republican candidate. It doesn’t mean they’re going to ignore the popular will and end democracy.
I don’t mind being concerned. I don’t even mind being alerted. But there’s a huge difference between this and the outright paranoia I’m seeing in the media.
Second, it’s not going to be close. Trump is going down bigly. He was 3 million votes short last time, millions of his supporters have died, and millions of young voters have joined the rolls. Plus, he’s unpopular. Yes, his base loves him. George McGovern’s base loved him, too. They may be 40% of the vote. More likely they’re 20%, and the other half of his vote is just Republican tribalism.
We’ve had three 3-2 elections in my lifetime. In 1964, in 1972, and in 1984. As recently as 1992 a Republican incumbent got just 38% of the vote. That was the first George Bush. Right now, Trump is down by 10, but that includes people who tell pollsters they’re undecided. Most polls already show Biden over 50%. For you to think this is a close race, you have to believe all the undecideds are secret Trump fans, and that millions of people suffering from plague and economic pain unimaginable a year ago want more of the same.
Reagan beat Carter by just under 10% in 1980 and won the electoral college 489-49. That’s the kind of result we’re looking at, regardless of what Election Twitter seems to think.
What about a coup?
The coup will fail. The military brass won’t go along. The FBI won’t go along. This economy is too big to let it happen. Violence in Trump’s name will be suppressed, once people know how the vote went. Wall Street and Tech Street will reject any coup attempt. A serious threat to public order by Trump would cost investors up to $10 trillion. Even Sheldon Adelson would bring a rope over that kind of loss.
What set me off was reaction to the First Debate, which CNN’s Dana Bash rightly called a “shitshow.” It was, indeed, a shitshow. Trump was shit. He was every abusive husband or boyfriend you’ve ever seen. He was everybody’s drunk uncle. Nothing he said even made sense, let alone held a grain of truth. At the end he refused to accept the coming election result and called for his far-right followers to get killy.
Trumpworld spent the whole next day claiming 65 million of us hadn’t seen what we’d just seen. Those who claimed Trump won the debate were mostly shut off by news anchors, except for Trump-controlled media which, as I said, only reaches 40% of the voters. Trump denied he said what he had said, while his acolytes insisted that he didn’t mean what he meant. But he did say it, and he did mean it. All of it.
Yet by the end of the next day Lefty Twitter, and the cable TV networks, were back on their takes that we’re about to see a coup, the end of democracy, we’re Belarus, Trump is going to get away with all of it, because reasons. There are no reasons.
As I’ve noted several times this year, there are historical parallels. Hitler had a lot of American fans in the late 1930s. Confederates didn’t just shut up after a few battlefield reverses. Everyone, at every time, only sees the story in front of them. No one knows how it is going to turn out.
I may be wrong.
But I don’t think so. If the American people were prepared to re-elect Trump after the events of 2020, then democracy is a sham and good riddance to it. If the American people really do like them some Trump, then Xi Jinping is right and only dictatorship works. Your father, your forefathers, and 250 years of Americans going back to the Boston Tea Party died for nothing. They were all suckers, they all bought a lie, people are stupid.
Of course, what these elites are really saying is other people are stupid. And this may burn me most of all. They see through it, the cable talkers and pundits insist, but everyone else can be taken in. Everyone else will be taken in, because, well, reasons.
The biggest support for right-wing idiocy is this smug assertion by liberal elites that “other people” are gullible, that only said elites have the “special knowledge” needed to protect the state from its enemies. It’s a profoundly anti-democratic attitude, because it shows support for democracy by those who claim to be its biggest fans is tissue deep.
All I’m saying is buck up. Vote. Have faith that the Democratic Party has got this. Believe that the institutions built over 230 years can and will hold, that we’re not going to wake up in February in a true hellscape with no Internet, no food, and no hope.
Trump will try. He will try everything he can. But in the end the people rule this country. As many as 150 million people are going to vote by November 3. If Trump gets 40% of that, he loses by 30 million, but he still gets 60 million votes. That’s the math. He can’t change it. It’s baked in. All the 90 million need do is believe enough in America to cast a ballot.
We got this.
