Campaign 2020

[Okri]

So, in amusing 2020 campaign news, the Conservative Party of Canada is having their leadership vote/count today. Unfortunately, the machine they used to open the envelopes is tearing the ballots so it's been delayed by several hours. A metaphor, I'm sure.

[Mister Tee]

The second big change is it's not Hillary Clinton (someone they've been trained to hate for decades as well as other corollaries) this time. It's Joe Biden.

The choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump should've resulted in the biggest landslide in American history. Joe Biden might get the blowout that Hillary Clinton deserved.

To some extent, the never-Trumpers were hoist with their own petard. They were very much part of the 20-plus-year campaign to demonize Hillary, which was largely undertaken because of early GOP fear of her as a presidential candidate. When the time rolled around for the indoctrination would pay off, these folks startlingly found themselves on the opposite side -- and their frantic "No, we were bullshitting all those years, you've got to vote for her" failed to persuade those who'd been propagandized. (The last-second Comey intrusion on essentially the same "she's corrupt" topic being the straw that broke the camel's back.)

We're lucky this time around: they never took Joe Biden seriously as a presidential hopeful (why would they, after his pitiful runs in '88 and '08?), so they not only never bothered to demonize him, they let him amass a reputation as the nicest guy in the world. 70-some-odd days isn't remotely enough time to change that. Biden will get every anti-Trump vote, of which there are plenty.

[Sabin]

Mister Tee wrote
I'm not sure I'd ascribe that much effect to the 2016 GOP convention. A whole lot of people didn't show up, wanting nothing to do with Trump. I think our miscalculation about 2016 was assuming that so much dissent from party leadership (the Never-Trumpers, the GOP-favoring newspapers who endorsed Hillary) would correlate to changes in voter behavior. We underestimated the nihilism of rank-and-file GOP voters: their willingness to stick with even a manifestly unfit candidate. This time, we accept that that's baked in. The big change is, the abysmal Trump record, which will have greater sway with non-GOP.

The second big change is it's not Hillary Clinton (someone they've been trained to hate for decades as well as other corollaries) this time. It's Joe Biden.

The choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump should've resulted in the biggest landslide in American history. Joe Biden might get the blowout that Hillary Clinton deserved.

[Mister Tee]

I'm not sure I'd ascribe that much effect to the 2016 GOP convention. A whole lot of people didn't show up, wanting nothing to do with Trump. I think our miscalculation about 2016 was assuming that so much dissent from party leadership (the Never-Trumpers, the GOP-favoring newspapers who endorsed Hillary) would correlate to changes in voter behavior. We underestimated the nihilism of rank-and-file GOP voters: their willingness to stick with even a manifestly unfit candidate. This time, we accept that that's baked in. The big change is, the abysmal Trump record, which will have greater sway with non-GOP.

However...I, too, may watch some of this week's convention, simply because i wonder just how much of a shitshow it can turn out to be. Dems had, basically, from April on to plan their convention -- and they had on their side the best talent in Hollywood (who haven't had anything else to do over that period). Republicans held to their dream of a normal convention for so long that they've had to put this replacement together on the quick. (And much of their best media talent is busy churning out Lincoln Project videos.) I'm curious whether this seeming handicap will be visible on-screen. As for their "message", I presume it will be some combination of optimistic gaslighting about the state of the country ("Things are actually mostly great, and only Trump can make it greater") and attempts at horror-villain-ing Biden/Harris. I expect the latter'll work as well as Hoover's "If Roosevelt is elected, grass will grow in city streets" -- pleasing the already-converted, laughable to everybody else.

A few last thoughts about the convention:

Biden's speech was a pleasant surprise: clearly at the top of his oratorical range. I don't think he needed anything beyond Acceptable, but extra points can't hurt.

Two quotes from other speakers jumped out at me as worth contemplating. One was Pete Buttigieg saying he looked out and saw what he thought of as Future Former Republicans. This speaks to the possibility of some of these Lifelong-Republican-but-voting-for-Biden folk sticking with the Dems for elections down the line. It's hard to read Jennifer Rubin and think she's swinging back GOP anytime soon. Not a few prominent former Republicans have taken a look back at the past few decades and acknowledged they were in denial about aspects of their party, the racism above all: Stuart Stevens, Max Boot, Charlie Sykes, Tim Miller (the latter wrote a post on The Bulwark the other day saying he was so excited by Biden's speech that he and Sykes looked at one and asked, Have we had it wrong all this time?). I'm of course not guaranteeing such a sea-change. But it's worth noting that the historical importance of Reagan was not just that he defeated a beleaguered President Carter, but that voters stuck with him through re-election and even unto a designated successor. It's worth hoping we're seeing just such a shift.

Which ties into my other notable quote: Andrew Yang saying that Joe Biden's super-power is that, whatever his position is becomes the New Reasonable. Many like to give Joe heat for his less-than-stellar choices along the way, like the Iraq war, and he certainly deserves such opprobrium. But let's also give credit that he's occasionally been ahead of the curve. Quite recently, Dems thought of gay marriage as a third-rail issue -- not a few thought it single-handedly elected Bush over Kerry in 2004. But Biden came out for it (ahead of Obama folks' wishes), and in short order it became an issue most people no longer even view as controversial. Biden, if elected, will have a House majority that's already passed a ton of progressive legislation, hopefully a Senate majority -- one that's openly talking about dropping the filibuster (when both Obama and Schumer express support, you can see that's an idea gaining force) -- and I don't see Joe vetoing anything that passes through that process. Biden won't be in-your-face about being progressive. But, like Lyndon Johnson (who was also never liked by the left, even at his best), he might bring about the most progressive achievements in decades and bring the country along in support.

[Sabin]

I would encourage everybody on this board to at least intermittently watch the RNC this coming week. It'll be essential to knowing what we're fighting.

I didn't watch back in 2016 because I thought FOX news had prepared me for it for eight years: turning Obama into the antichrist, Benghazi nonsense, panic about ISIS, immigration, Black Lives Matter. Or as Jon Stewart so eloquently put it in 2012, "Chaos on Bullshit Mountain." I missed the right getting unifying and galvanized in a way that clearly we didn't. For four years my biggest fear about Trump is that he hasn't lost one vote. With Coronavirus, that's clearly not the case anymore. He's lost old votes. Clearly, he knows that. Trump basically has three moves left: the convention, the debates, and whatever rabbit he can pull out of his hat. I'm not missing any of them this time.

Next week is going to be scary.

[Big Magilla]

Magilla, are you forgetting Reagan over Mondale? 525 electoral votes to 13. A popular vote deficit of almost 17 million?

I presume Magilla was speaking of challengers defeating incumbents, in which case Roosevelt/Hoover is still the gold standard.

Yes, I should have been clearer. The 1932 election was the repudiation of a much loathed incumbent. Trump is more loathed than Hoover ever was but perhaps not by as much of the electorate with ten weeks to go.

[Mister Tee]

Magilla, are you forgetting Reagan over Mondale? 525 electoral votes to 13. A popular vote deficit of almost 17 million?

If you're going for widest margin, Roosevelt over Landon, Johnson over Goldwater, and Nixon over McGovern were bigger than Reagan's. But those (including Reagan's) were all incumbent re-elections. I presume Magilla was speaking of challengers defeating incumbents, in which case Roosevelt/Hoover is still the gold standard.

Biden won't likely top Bush I's EV margin, because states are considerably more polarized now than they were then -- even the worst GOPer is going to win 100-130 EVs. (And the lamest Dem would probably score even higher.) But I certainly think there's an excellent chance of Biden's raw vote margin being substantially greater. Hell, Bill Clinton '96 won by a wider vote margin than Bush.

I'm not going to make any specific call, because I have some level of superstition. But I note that Trump's approval rating still hovers around 40-42%, and it's not impossible he shows that on Election Day, with most of the rest going to Biden.

This is what Rachel Bitecofer wrote today:

"I cannot overstate how weak Trump is- with two effects working against him. Negative partisanship, driving up turnout of Ds & left-leaning Indies, and now a significant persuasion effect from his utter failure to manage the pandemic & his illiberalism."

[OscarGuy]

Magilla, are you forgetting Reagan over Mondale? 525 electoral votes to 13. A popular vote deficit of almost 17 million?

[Sabin]

Big Magilla wrote
Is anyone here actually planning on watching next week's Trump shitstorm, more politely referred to as the Republic National Convention? I think we should all boycott it and hope it gets the lowest ratings of any televised political convention in history.

This is a contest between good and evil unlike any presidential election we've ever seen. Anyone who still supports Trump is either evil or stupid or both. This should be the greatest landslide since Roosevelt over Hoover in 1932. If it is, Biden will have a mandate unlike any president since Roosevelt and will be more than just the transitional president many expect. It can happen, but will it?

Yesterday, Donald Trump said he is dispatching law enforcement to the polling stations. Who knows if he can actually do it. I suspect not because it is unclear still whether Donald Trump will be remembered as an existential threat to our nation or the most incompetent President we've ever had. But I want to know what the people who will be showing up to the polling stations will have seen. I fear violence. Ratings are utterly meaningless.

Biden should have a historic mandate. But hey! Kerry should have as well, right? And probably McGovern too. But what's Biden's window of victory? It's hard to imagine that he exceeds George H.W. Bush's EV total from 1988.

[Big Magilla]

Is anyone here actually planning on watching next week's Trump shitstorm, more politely referred to as the Republic National Convention? I think we should all boycott it and hope it gets the lowest ratings of any televised political convention in history.

This is a contest between good and evil unlike any presidential election we've ever seen. Anyone who still supports Trump is either evil or stupid or both. This should be the greatest landslide since Roosevelt over Hoover in 1932. If it is, Biden will have a mandate unlike any president since Roosevelt and will be more than just the transitional president many expect. It can happen, but will it?

[taki15]

(I assume they have a call in to Officer Chauvin)

I'm sure he would have been a speaker if not for certain "technical difficulties".

[Sabin]

Sonic Youth wrote
I feel like I just watched the American version of "The King's Speech".

... until it became the end of The Family Feud. My God if there was ever a moment to just let a man walk quietly off the stage and let us take in a moment...

I'm full of mixed feelings about the week. I suspect we're looking at the future of conventions. It felt like the Oscars going hostless. Who desperately wants to go back? Appropriately, it was a week of hushed tones and calls for justice. Donald Trump wasn't viciously attacked. He was calmly derided as a failure in the wake of the virus and social unrest. This convention was a call for relief. And yet, the tone was so somber it felt cringey. And occasionally (as was the case with poor Billy Porter) just cringey. I'll be blunt: this wasn't for me. I wasn't the target. The goal of this convention was to get those moderate Republican voters fed up with Trump and finally (as has long been the dream) bring them over to a Joe Biden majoritarian Democratic Party, a Centrist Coalition with room on the left and the right, emceed by celebrities, vs. a Republican Nativist Party which can be no alternative for any sane person. I suspect it could only be successful after the long, hot spring and summer we've just had. My verdict is it got better as it went along. But it wasn't for me.

And yet, I'd be remiss if I didn't find one thing disingenuous about it: where was The Squad? Why was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez given one ceremonial duty? Considering their wildly successful primaries, they're not going anywhere. For a week devoted to inclusion and racial justice, there was no effort to include any of these women? I'm sorry but these women are part of the Democratic Party. They're wildly popular among Gen Z and Millennnial progressives like myself. Why? It's either because the DNC thought they would alienate moderate Republicans or because they hate them because they don't play ball. I'm sorry but for a week devoted to fighting for racial justice, that's disappointing. It's probably a few other words too. Think I'm wrong? Why wasn't Julian Castro there? Could it have anything to do with his outspokenness against Joe Biden?

I wish there was a way the DNC could both offer relief while also showcasing their future (beyond the Zoom). I could rant about the Republicans who were invited vs. the Democrats who weren't, but it's all very practical programming and likely will prove very successful in the fall. But there's been so much star power elected over the past four years and this week was all about political royalty. As a Millennial Democrat, I will always look at this week as a personal disappointment for its inability to show pride in some of the women who exemplify their cries for inclusion and justice -- and I am not the only young-ish person who feels that way. Many feel a range of indifferent to betrayed.

Most successful of the week was the framing of Joe Biden as the candidate we need. You couldn't write a better personality for the moment. An old white man who is everything his opponent isn't. Beyond anything else, a man who knows grief and tragedy against a man who makes everything about himself. The framing got better as it went along as well. Many of the nights, I'll be frank, he struck me as frail and occasionally looked a bit confused. But tonight, the framing -- and Joe -- worked very well. Acceptance speeches are never usually a highpoint of the ceremony, are they? I struggle to remember anyone's, even Obama's. For Biden, there was no clever turn of phrase. Just a convincing, statesmanly yet personal vision of hope. He's framed his entire campaign as a fight for the soul of the country. I've found his platitudes disingenuous in the past but tonight it worked fantastically, evoking darkness vs. light as if his whole life was a lead-up to this campaign as a moral crusade. But always humble, plainspoken, and covering every base like an expert politician. It struck me as quite effective.

Can I still say though: how much has Trump dropped the ball where Biden saying "When I'm President, we'll have PPE" was an effective attack? Nothing from Biden about eviction moratoriums or UBI. "I won't pretend like the virus isn't a thing." "Unlike the previous teacher, I'll wear pants." I think we need more than a teacher who will agree to wear pants.

The week was also the country's introduction to Kamala Harris. It’s unfair to put expectations so high on Harris when she exceeded beyond any running mate in my lifetime. But the coming decade is going to be awful and it's entirely possible that this week we saw the woman who is going to be second or first on the ticket for all of it. I thought she came off scripted. She’s still not quite settled into the position she's been thrust into so quickly. But clearly, instantly this a major player who isn't going anywhere. Like Joe Biden, she has time to grow into the moment. But it needs to happen soon.

EDIT: last thought, one possible side effect of the Trump Presidency is it might help to establish the Obama Coalition of the Democratic Party as the long-term ruling majoritarian party of the country. This will be their fourth consecutive popular vote victory. This hasn’t happened since the New Deal. Would we be heading for a fourth term under Clinton? I don’t know. I’d imagine the Dems would be shellacked during the midterms again (I can’t imagine how hollowed our our Houses would be) but her response to COVID would be better so possibly no recession. Hard to say. But the warning shot of Trump’s Presidency might actually end of scaring so many back to the party with hopefully the Senate along with it creating a stronger track record of success to run on than Obama was afforded, wins in 2024 and maybe 2028 suddenly become a little more viable than they seemed on that exhausting morning of 11/9/16 when it felt like Clinton dragged herself across the finish line. Let’s win this thing, get a public option, gun control, immigration reform, a higher minimum wage, and will somebody finally legalize weed (asking for a friend)?

[Sonic Youth]

I feel like I just watched the American version of "The King's Speech".

[Sonic Youth]

How's everybody enjoying the PBS DNC "Rock the Virus" Telethon?

Not such a bad thing, maybe. You know, telethons are utilized after a horrifying natural disaster or an emergency situation. What would make this any different?

[Mister Tee]

I know you acknowledged this, but the fact that America voted for him once is enough to make me fear. I don't know a single person in my life that is truly optimistic that the country won't do it again.

I've been meaning to respond to this for some days.

I can't recall if I've posted my theory of the 2016 election here. I know I didn't in the immediate aftermath, because I was too shell-shocked at the time. But I have to semantically quibble with the notion that "America voted for him once". As we all know, Hillary Clinton got 3 million more votes than he did. His Electoral College triumph was the narrowest imaginable -- three states flipped by margins of less than 1% each. (The three states, remarkably, precisely the three on which Paul Manafort shared polling data with Russia, if you want to go there.) People describe it as drawing to an inside straight, but I'd go further: it was drawing three cards to an inside straight flush. Even more to the point: Hillary's vote margin was almost certainly (per Nate Silver) shrunk by the eleventh-hour appearance of the Comey letter -- not just that it appeared, but that it appeared too late in the game for people who'd decided they could safely stay home or vote third party (lefties for Jill Stein, never-Trump Republicans for Gary Johnson) to process the information. On Election Day, a significant number of non- or third party-voters were persuaded that Hillary had it in the bag, and didn't feel the need to vote for her. Had you re-run the election two days later, with everyone having the knowledge Trump could win, I'm 100% certain Hillary's margins would have been enough to easily carry those three states, and likely Florida/North Carolina as well. The results of all elections since -- with their massively-amped Democratic turnout --seem a retroactive apology to Hillary, and suggest what we're going to see this November.

Put it this way: If you want to say America elected George Bush, and therefore we can't trust them ever again, that's perfectly valid. But Trump's win has so many asterisks and flukes surrounding it that I don't think it's fair to put the onus on Americans as if they'd knowingly elected Hitler. If we do it again in November, then you can make that claim. But I think we're in a very different place.

In fact, the two Bush elections offer a solid analogy. When I said, midway through the 2008 cycle, that I thought Obama would win convincingly, the most common reaction I got was, I thought that in 2004, as well. But 2004 and 2008 were very different elections. The fact that many of us despised Bush couldn't overcome the fact that his unchallenged status within his party, his early-on successes in Afghanistan, and a mostly solid economy gave him a decent (if shaky) shot at re-election. By 2008, the Iraq war was catastrophic, the midterms had diminished the GOP, McCain was weakened by not being the incumbent, Obama was a charismatic opponent, and, of course, in the end the Lehman-led meltdown made the economy a deep negative. Different contexts, different outcomes. Similarly: the 2016 electoral environment was about on edge for the incumbent Dem administration: the economy was good and there were no foreign policy fires, but Hillary was far from charismatic, the party had had a bad midterm, and persistent bad blood from Bernie voters kept the party from truly unifying. All this made the election a close call. This year is very different: an incumbent party walloped in the midterms, a scandal-ridden/impeached president, a public health disaster that's destroyed the economy, and social unrest beyond what we've seen since the 60s. This is an environment in which ANY incumbent would struggle; the fact that this particular incumbent is so personally disliked by so many only makes it easier on the out-party. To believe Trump will triumph in this situation is to believe he has truly unearthly electoral powers. Obviously, none of us is going to fully dismiss that notion until Biden has claimed his 270th EV. But it's kind of like believing in magic. Or, as never-Trumper Mike Murphy says, it's like taking Alexandra's view of Rasputin: because he was there when the kid stopped bleeding, he must have special powers. This thinking eventually put Alexandra in front of a firing squad.

A few words about the convention, while I'm here:

Michelle: divine.

I've always been a sucker for the roll-call of the states, even in these non-suspenseful years, and I thought the countrywide tour was fun. (Was glad to note that "Guam, where America's day begins" survived the new format.)

Barack is still the master. What a speech. As someone said elsewhere, it's remarkable that both he and Michelle are capable of such inspirational, crowd-elevating rhetoric, but can also deliver stern cautionary speeches like these.

I didn't think Kamala's speech was as well-written as the one she gave last week at the introductory appearance, but it had its moments, and she's an excellent speaker who carried it off well. Most people following Barack in peak form would have seemed puny; that she seemed still solid in that context shows how strong a talent she is.

You've got to tip your hat to the Trump folk for their counter-programming this week: a Senate report showing there was indeed collusion with Russia, lining up the St. Louis gun-toters and the Covington kid for their convention (I assume they have a call in to Officer Chauvin), giving a shout-out to QAnon, and having Steve Bannon arrested (aboard a boat!) thanks to the postal service.(ON EDIT: Forgot: calling for a boycott of Goodyear. Who needs Ohio?)