On Facebook, many fellow liberals shared and commented on the poll with a sense of triumph which has been mirrored by media figures in partisan Democratic circles and the Republican never-Trump camp. The gloating was based on the assumption that Donald Trump will be stuck in a downward spiral through election day due to the state of the economy and his colossal mishandling of COVID-19 and the George Floyd protests.
Don’t count on it.
Five months is an eternity in a presidential election cycle and Trump’s luck could improve. The economy is rebounding, albeit slowly, daily rates of (reported) COVID-19 deaths countrywide are still high but down from April, and swing voters are fickle creatures with remarkably short memories.
And the polling data isn’t conclusive. Returning to the Post poll, the ten-point lead was among registered voters, but turnout is not guaranteed, particularly during a pandemic. Among likely voters, Biden’s lead was just five points.
Moreover, national polls are of limited value because presidents are chosen by the antiquated electoral college, not the popular vote. Trump and Biden are within a few points of each other in the states which will decide the election—Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Biden’s pathways to the presidency would be to win Florida and one other swing state or Michigan, Pennsylvania, and either Arizona or Wisconsin.
Of the six swing states, Florida and North Carolina are the most conservative. Democrats like to flirt with North Carolina, but the state is a long shot at best. It has voted Democratic in just two presidential elections over the last 50 years: conservative Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter won the state in 1976, and Barack Obama squeaked through by 14,000 votes in 2008 because of his strength among black voters and huge financial advantage over John McCain. In 2012, Obama lost North Carolina by 100,000 votes despite pouring resources into the state and having the Democratic convention in Charlotte. Hillary Clinton lost North Carolina by 180,000 votes in 2016 while outspending Trump many times over.
Florida could break Biden’s way if his lead with women over 65 holds, but it’s a crapshoot; though it has been competitive in presidential elections, Florida is a red state which has been under Republican control since 1999. During the blue wave of 2018, in which Democrats won ten million more votes nationwide, Florida voters elected a far-right Republican gubernatorial candidate and ousted an incumbent Democratic senator.
Of the other four swing states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona—Biden appears strongest in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump barely won Michigan in 2016, Democrats had commanding wins up and down the ticket in the 2018 midterm, and a strong union presence will help get out the vote for Biden. Pennsylvania is Biden’s home state. It went deep blue in 2018 and Biden has had consistent leads there among quality pollsters. Without both of these states, it would be virtually impossible for him to win the election.
If Biden wins Michigan and Pennsylvania, but loses North Carolina and Florida, he would have to win Arizona or Wisconsin to become president. Biden is ahead in poll averages, but the margins are small and both states present challenges.
Arizona is trending toward the Democrats due to the growing Latino vote and a shift to the center among some suburban voters. But winning the state is a tall order for Democrats, as Republicans have passed a number of bills designed to disenfranchise native Americans, Latinos, and African-Americans, including voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting, and a gratuitous measure to disqualify ballots submitted in the wrong precinct. Democrats have won Arizona just once in 70 years, when Bill Clinton narrowly beat Bob Dole thanks to the presence of right-leaning third party candidate Ross Perot.
Which could leave the fate of American democracy in the hands of Wisconsin, a dicey proposition.
Other than Madison, Milwaukee, and a handful of small and medium-sized towns that are light blue, Wisconsin tends to be rural, white, and beet red. In addition to his demographic edge, Trump will again be helped along by Republican allies who will do everything in their power to rig the election in his favor.
A voter ID law passed by the Wisconsin GOP, one of the most draconian in the country, handed the state to Trump in 2016 and could disenfranchise tens of thousands of (overwhelmingly Democratic) voters in 2020. The Wisconsin GOP will further suppress Democratic turnout by purging 130,000 citizens from the voting rolls, a move that will exacerbate election day chaos and make voting lines in blue areas even longer than they would already be, disenfranchising Democratic students and people of color in Madison and Milwaukee in large numbers.
Trump could disenfranchise voters at the national level by allowing the postal service to die—which would impose on tens of millions of Americans the terrible choice of voting in person during a pandemic or not at all—or declaring a national quarantine before the election (if reported cases of COVID-19 spike with the flu season), which would limit voting to people who receive absentee ballots before election day. Furthermore, Republican operatives plan to systematically send "poll watchers" into inner cities and tribal areas to harass and intimidate voters of color out of exercising their franchise.
Incumbency also gives Trump a number of significant advantages over Joe Biden.
He has a more enthusiastic base whom he has been feeding a steady diet of red meat for five years.
He has a big financial advantage, which translates into more negative ads and more field offices in swing states to support his ground game.
His digital operation is light years ahead of Biden’s, and he has the backing of Mark Zuckerberg, who decided that Facebook will go after penny-ante offenders of community rules rather than vast propaganda merchants who fill Facebook’s coffers with advertising revenue.
Most important of all, Trump has Vladimir Putin.
As revealed in Cyberwar, a 2018 masterwork of research and analysis by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Russia’s efforts on behalf of Trump in 2016 were extensive and brutally effective. Among other operations, Russian intelligence created over fifty THOUSAND fake Twitter accounts to artificially trend pro-Trump/anti-Clinton talking points and push them into the media dialog, fed stolen Democratic Party emails through Wikileaks at strategic moments to shape the news cycles in the crucial final month of the campaign, and manipulated social media to dissuade black voters and Sanders supporters in swing states from voting for Clinton, which worked like a charm. Jamieson, the non-partisan co-founder of factcheck.org, concluded that Russia probably chose our president, and there’s no doubt they will try to do so again in 2020.
Even if a big financial advantage, a superior digital campaign enabled by Mark Zuckerberg’s boundless greed, the feral enthusiasm of his lizard-brained base, the aggressive vote suppression efforts of Trump and his allies, and the support of Russia’s best hackers and army of troll farms aren’t enough to win the election for Trump at the ballot box, there’s the possibility that he could “win” in the courts if the election is close, as George W. Bush did in 2000, or refuse to recognize the election results, which would leave control of the presidency up to the U.S. military.
In other words, confidence among Democrats at this point is naive and misplaced. It’s a long way to November and this is still Trump’s race to lose.
Democrats’ only hope is to mobilize women, Gen X and Gen Y, people of color, enviros, labor, the LGBTQ community, and any American with rudimentary critical thinking skills to beat Trump by a large enough margin that he can’t steal the election in the courts.
Barring a Biden landslide, we can kiss our democracy goodbye.
Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter
More political writing by Dan Benbow:
The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens
are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush
The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
(a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism
of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
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