PASSING THE CENTURY MARK

Sunday was a significant milestone in the 2020 election calendar with it being 100 days until Election Day

Today there are exactly 14 weeks until the country renders its verdict on Trump, his administration, and his Republican Party.

But some voters may be making their voices heard sooner given the state of current events

As I noted in my post prior to the New Hampshire primary in an era that was before COVID-19 ravaged the nation, many states have an early voting period and a candidate can amass a vote total to withstand a late surge as well as the strategies voters implement. The successful Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012 pushed early voting to get their supporters out to the polls and it paid off handsomely. Clinton in 2016 had an early vote advantage in Florida and it was assumed that she would carry the state, but a late surge of voters who were undecided about both candidates went to Trump – caused in part due to the Comey letter dropping when it did – thus costing her the critical swing state that has gone to the electoral college winner since 1996.

COVID-19 had an impact on the primary season where several states pushed their primaries back, and in some instances forcing several states to expand their mail-in voter system from those in the military and physically unable to do so at a polling location. 16 states plus DC decided to expand their mail-in systems due to the ongoing pandemic. North Carolina will be mailing out ballots on 4 September as well as several states from at a minimum of 45 days before the 3 November election. Minnesota and South Dakota begin their early voting period on 18 September followed by Michigan, New Jersey, Vermont, and Virginia the next day, and Illinois starts their early voting on 24 September.

In short, the time for Biden and especially Trump to make their case to the American people is running out. Even though there are debates scheduled, they are taking place in the midst of when states will have an early voting period. The Democratic National Convention was expected to take place prior to the 2020 Summer Olympics but COVID-19 changed the schedule: the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo are scheduled for next summer and with many events held remotely, the Democratic Convention will still be held in Milwaukee the week prior to the Republican Convention in Charlotte, NC Jacksonville, FL Charlotte, NC somewhere in North Carolina.

Based on the national (and most importantly state polls) that I am following, they are matching Trump’s job approval averages as tracked by FiveThirtyEight. Remember, Trump was “elected” president with 46% of the national popular vote and his average approval rating was only above that mark in the first few days of his term. Disapproval of his job took the lead just two weeks into his presidency, back when he instituted the Muslim ban thus creating chaos within the Department of Homeland Security on how to implement the policy and leading to mass demonstrations at various airports across the country to protest it.

On Election Day 2018, Trump’s job approval was 53-42 disapprove which closely matched the House popular vote of 53-45 for the Democrats and leading to them flipping 41 seats to hand Nancy Pelosi the gavel for the second time in her career. Converting that to electoral college votes it is a modest electoral college win for the Democrats.

If that map looks familiar, it is similar to the Obama 2012 map minus Ohio

Instead of changing course like Clinton did after the 1994 midterms or showing a willingness to work with the opposition as George W. Bush did after 2006 and Barack Obama attempted only to face stiff Republican resistance after 2010, Trump continued on as if nothing had happened. This recklessness led to Trump coercing Ukraine to discover information on his potential Democratic opponent and causing the House to finally impeach him. Trump was acquitted in the Senate mainly due to Republicans lining up to stand by him no matter the damage it will do the Constitution and the scorn they will face from their constituents.

And now we are in the midst of a pandemic as well as a protest movement to address racial disparities in not just law enforcement, but society as a whole.

This president, his administration, and his party has failed in the pandemic response leading to the death of over 150,000 of our fellow citizens that continues to rise daily, a medical system that is on the brink, and a haphazard effort to reopen the country that is prioritizing economic matters over everything else. This president and his administration in their efforts to gut the federal government ended up tossing out the pandemic response playbook because it was an Obama creation and tried their best to downplay it as a worst case of the flu while the number of cases rose exponentially. They further fostered confusion by trafficking in baseless conspiracy theories, mainly by one of his idiot sons and the president himself.

His party – especially his quislings in the Senate, governors in states such as Arizona, Florida, and Texas who are responding poorly to the pandemic, and propogandists in the conservative media-industrial complex – have tried to shift the blame away from this president because he gets triggered over the slightest criticisms over his job performance.

Trump’s response to the protests over racial disparities is no better and he was already in the basement to start with on that issue. There are many examples of Trump’s racism prior to his entry into politics but his recent history into the political sphere was nearly 10 years ago when he became the Pied Piper for the outrageous idea that Barack Obama was not born in this country, and when he slowly transited down the golden escalator to announce his 2016 bid five years ago he characterized Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers. Instead of trying to find a way to reduce tensions, he has inflamed them with deploying federal forces as a personal brute squad to clear out a DC park to stage a photo op as well in cities such as Albuquerque, Kansas City, Portland, and Seattle. All of these are efforts by Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, to try to resuscitate his campaign and provide masturbatory materials for his supporters to show that the chaos HE caused will happen under a Biden administration.

This is who Trump is and despite the talks of his bubble saying that he will change his tone, this is who Trump will be. He will continue to feed his base – the 58% of white voters that supported him in 2016 – while ignoring the rest of the country. Those are the REAL Americans… that is until COVID-19 started killing off his people in the states that voted for him.

Biden won the nomination due to the Democratic field clearing out after black voters had their say in the South Carolina primary and a huge surge of Super Tuesday voters who waited to cast their ballots – like myself – swung to him after those two events. In the general election, based on what I am seeing, voters have made up their minds on who they are voting for. If you support Trump, you are going to vote for him; if you don’t support Trump, you are going to vote for the option that opposes him and that is Biden.

A lot of Democrats are shy after what happened in 2016 where forecasters all but guaranteed a Clinton win, even though looking back there were signs such as FiveThirtyEight’s forecast giving Trump a 28% chance of winning, a 10% chance of Clinton winning the popular vote but not the electoral vote, and Trump an 85% chance of flipping a state Obama won in 2012.

Trump turned that election into referendum on Hillary Clinton's trustworthiness using the amount of misinformation gathered over her political career as well as stoking white fears over terrorism, immigration, and a rapidly changing America that was going too fast for some of these people. There was also a huge pool of undecided voters that as I mentioned before that either swung hard for Trump when the Comey letter dropped, cast ballots for the third-party options that had no chance of winning, refused to vote for the top of ticket, or stayed home on Election Day.

Instead the 2020 election is shaping up to be a referendum on him, his administration, and his party

And in coming weeks, despite the pandemic, the American people will make their voices heard.