US Elections – the boy who cried wolf – Trump and the existentialist argument

With just over a week to go to the US Presidential Elections, the polls still have Biden in a comfortable lead. Or…do they?

Unless, unless Biden wins Texas (which is a long shot), he has no realistic path without winning at least one of the three next biggest states in play – Pennsylvania, Ohio or Florida.

Of these, he is best placed in PA but polls have been tightening. A 5.1 RCP average lead would, you’d think, be secure but the projected lead in Wisconsin was even higher in 2016 and Clinton still lost that state. So it’s still possible.

And Biden slipped, not too heavily, in announcing that he would discontinue oil subsidies. A normal politician might perhaps have engaged him in a substantive debate and missed the punch. But Trump…he said right off the bat, “Whoa, that’s going to play so well in Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma…and Ohio (said in a near-whisper)”. It was almost a “You just dropped the World Cup, mate” moment if you watch cricket and remember that Waugh-Gibbs incident from the ’99 World Cup. And Biden just might have. They wanted a debate on substance and not just name calling and interruptions unlike the first one. And who improved his debate performance as a result of this adjustment? Trump, not Biden.

Which, in a way, is not a surprise. The Dems want to sell a platform that blue collar voters don’t like…and they want to be able to do it without offending one of various factions of the party. Naturally, then, the platform gets reduced to a bunch of nice sounding rhetoric and, in the Trump era, anti-Trumpism. It’s much safer.

Trump has provided them all the ammunition they need as well in running the Trump as an existential threat to democracy itself. And they are not completely wrong. So why does the argument not work quite as well as they would like? I mean, if Trump is so bad and if he screwed up the pandemic so epically, why is he only trailing by 8 point and still very much in contention in the states that matter?

To understand that would require The Resistance to open their ears a little and listen to what people like Matt Taibbi, Chris Hedges or Katie Halper are saying. People whom they seem to hate even more than Trumpists. Like, how dare they not regard Biden as a good enough candidate? How can they still feel undecided or unethused about this election? How can they not see the stakes? How can they make a suicide pact?

To understand their perspective, you have to understand, like really understand, why most of these people (and I would add Jimmy Dore or Krystal Ball to that list) were strong supporters of Bernie Sanders. You can, of course, go Bernie Bro to summon the spectre of a white male supremacist who switched his vote from Bernie to Trump. You can do so by ignoring that women like Halper or Ball or black men like Cornel West were also in the Bernie camp. Heck, Nina Turner was a Bernie surrogate and yet the media never retired their Bernie Bro trope.

Now why do I think I have some understanding of the Bernie phenomenon? To be clear, I don’t have a LOT of. But I do think I understand it better than somebody like Stephanie Ruhle or Chris Matthews who gets/got unleashed on national television. Why do I say so? Because my cousin is a Bernie supporter and worked for his campaign. She even shared the letter Sanders sent out to his campaign announcing the end of his bid for the Democratic nomination. She remains unethused about Biden even while agreeing that Trump is terrible.

To understand why that is, you need to go back to Super Tuesday. The pre-Super Tuesday polls had Sanders headed for a sweep. That panicked a lot of people, including a much liked Nobel Peace Prize winning former President. Obama pulled the strings from behind the curtain and prodded Klobuchar and Buttigieg to end their campaigns. Bloomberg remained to offer an alternative to those centrists who weren’t convinced about Biden. Warren remained to offer an alternative to those progressives who weren’t convinced about Sanders.

You see, had the Dem field remained as crowded as it had been leading up to Super Tuesday, Sanders would have had a pretty good chance of prevailing in several states that he ended up losing. Instead, the difference between Biden and Sanders’ vote share was, in many cases, Warren.

If you are part of The Resistance, you pooh-pooh this. But you know who else pointed this out? Donald J Trump.

Ergo, you can argue the details till the cows come home but this is the perception and that has been cemented. You can see Kyle Kulinski agrees too. Some like Dore have gone further and called Sanders a sheepdog to pacify the Left and manage their coalition into voting for the Democratic Party.

So why were these games played to ensure a Sanders defeat in the Primary? Because the same people who fear the threat of Trump to American democracy fear the threat of Sanders to the American system equally as much, if not more. It is right to say ‘more’ in at least some cases. Lloyd Blankfein openly said he would vote for Trump if Sanders became the Dem nominee.

Now let’s set this up against the supposed cost of a Trump presidency. They say Trump would kill healthcare. They say he would hurt LGBT rights. Most importantly, they say he would set back the fight against climate change severely. Huh, guess what Sanders is and has long been a much bigger ally of these causes than Biden. It’s not even close. You really think Biden has a better plan to fight climate change than Sanders? Like, come on, man! No, so…the issue is these causes, important as they may be, are not more important than the moderate center-right neo liberal consensus that the establishment is most concerned with preserving.

And…they want you to believe that is somehow acceptable while Trumpists privileging their ideology over climate change or healthcare is not only not ok but deeply bigoted and dangerous. Meanwhile, Biden saying you ain’t black if you aren’t voting Democrat is A.O.K.

Let me tell you something, kiddo, if I can spot these hypocrisies from thousands of miles away, you are not fooling some of the very smart people who backed Sanders. They know nothing is going to change for them with a Biden presidency. How do they know it? Because he said so, already, lol.

So they have dared you. They are not indifferent or stupid. They have called out you on your wolf-cries. You cried Weimar Republic when Reagan ran and again when Bush Jr did. You said Romney would put people back in chains. They’re saying, wait, if democracy is so important, so sacred to you, why do you think manipulating the primaries is ok? They have thrown you the gauntlet. OK, you say we don’t understand the importance of democracy. Fine, we don’t. Let’s see you save it since you do.

In 2016, the Democratic Party ran a referendum on Trump because he was, after all, so obviously unqualified for the job. They lost. In 2020, they are running a referendum again because he has, so obviously, failed at the job. It’s the same bet in essence all over again whilst hoping for a radically different outcome.

Godspeed to that. And while you’re at it, do watch Guardian’s Anywhere But Washington series. And before you scream raceest, sexist, bigoted, understand that their reporting did, in 2016, capture where the race was at with more accuracy than CNN or MSNBC. Listen to Phil Harris’ summing up in the end and tell me he wasn’t prescient. This was months ahead, in the Primaries.

Cut to 2020, Guardian shows the seniors still in Trump’s camp in The Villages in Florida, people deciding to vote in Texas this time after never voting because they fear Trump would lose and close races in Georgia and Ohio. Hopefully that sounds reassuring enough to you as we wait for Election Day and the counting process that is expected to last longer this time.