Election 2020

The world has changed since nature unleashed the CoV-2 virus upon us. The election this year will definitely be a weird one. Who knows what the pandemic will look like in November. Will we have 10’s of millions of infected Americans? Will we have a treatment? No way we have a vaccine by then, and even when we do get one, there’s no telling whether it will be effective enough. After all, we don’t have vaccines for the common cold, often caused by coronaviruses. Our flu shots have to be tweaked every year because the damn thing comes back evolved and ready to infect. So will we all be standing in long, physically distanced lines wearing gloves and masks to vote?

I think the chances that most states take on a mail-in election is slim. Trump and the Republican Party generally hate the idea of voting by mail. The more people vote, the more likely they don’t do particularly well. It’s why they try to make it harder to vote every year, not easier. Perhaps, as David Pakman speculates, Democratic voters will have suppressed turnout because they’re more likely to follow preventative measures and take the risk of infection seriously vs. GOP voters who are more likely to venture out, probably without masks, and perhaps with an assault rifle at their side in open carry states.

One thing is certain: the pandemic will have an impact on people’s votes. It is a difficult challenge to throw at any leader, but the President of the United States has put his incompetence on display in a moment of crisis like at no other time in his wild and wacky tenure in the Oval Office. His idea of the job of President is to monitor media coverage of him and his performance, and try to control the message. Be omnipresent online and on TV and do rallies with his supporters, where he can just ad lib nonsense until he’s sweaty and tired and get back on the plane to some KFC. Actually coming up with plans based on information he received well before the virus hit American shores is not in his version of the job description. His first response is always, “how does this make me look?” The idea of a nationwide epidemic of sick people would make him look pretty bad. So keep quiet about it until he’s pressed, then paint a rosy picture based on nothing and attack anyone who says differently. Well, the virus is immune to all of Trump’s lifelong tactics:

• The virus doesn’t have a Twitter account.
• The virus doesn’t care what you call it.
• The virus can’t be threatened, sued,  or paid off.
• The virus can’t be bullied, ignored, or ridiculed.

In CoV-2, Donald Trump has met an adversary he has no idea how to contend with. And it shows.

Meanwhile, the Democratic race is over and former VEEP Joe Biden is the man who voters will have to decide they’d rather have in charge than four more years of DJT. How’s that looking? It looks like a landslide to me.

One thing I’ve learned over my many years of following politics is that polls are not to be trusted. Nonetheless, they are what we have to measure the political mood so I went to a blank map of the electorate and started filling in the sure things. I then went to all the swing states and only filled them in if there were recent polls–and by recent I mean April during the state of emergency–and the result was clear. If it was close, or if the polls were older, I left them blank.

I will continue to monitor this and maybe update my prediction every month or so, but more likely I will wait to make a truly bold prediction until October or so, because by then, there’s no telling what the mood will be in the United States.