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Welcome to the first 2020 installment of our quadrennial series tracking the electoral math in the presidential race. We've done this three times previously, and (like pretty much everyone else in the political prediction game) failed miserably the last time around. Hey, two out of three ain't bad, right?
The campaign to re-elect Donald Trump president has gone all-in on a remarkable strategy: they're going to double down on the stupid. Call it the greatest attempt at gaslighting ever, we suppose. The idea is to just pretend the coronavirus pandemic doesn't exist and continue to ignore any evidence to the contrary. And they actually expect this to be a big winner for them with the voters.
You can call it many things. Shooting one's self in the foot. Being hoist on your own petard. A European might call it an "own goal." But whatever metaphor you choose, it seems Donald Trump is actively sabotaging his own chances of re-election. Trump, in classic Trumpian style, has chosen to make a political statement about an issue that really has nothing to do with politics at all. And it's beginning to work among his most fervent followers. The only problem for Trump is that this means it is also working against his chances of re-election.
Even though both Donald Trump and Mike Pence have been casting their ballots by mail for the past few elections, Trump decided it would be a dandy idea to demonize voting by mail. But due to the overwhelming likelihood that this November's elections are going to be radically different in nature than previous elections due to the coronavirus pandemic, this means that the Republican Party is being hamstrung in its efforts to get its voters to safely vote by mail. Trump may not just be killing his own chances of being re-elected, but he may also bring a whole bunch of other Republicans down with him as well.
The Trump campaign is setting itself up for a rather large tactical failure. Whether the campaign fails overall in November is a bigger question, of course, but they seem to already be failing in one crucial aspect of any successful presidential campaign, and that is to define your opponent early. This worked wonders for Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, and it also did the trick for George W. Bush against John Kerry. Throughout the spring and summer, the incumbent president successfully defined their challenger in a very negative way with the public.
Instead, please enjoy the following column, which ran on the Fourth of July, 2008. Just to remind everyone, at that particular point in time Barack Obama had secured the Democratic presidential nomination, but the general election was still months away.
In the best of times, Americans like to call our president by a rather grandiose title: "the leader of the free world." This is a holdover from the 1940s post-war era as well as the dichotomy of the Cold War era which followed it. Back then, we were indeed leading the free world -- in direct opposition to the Soviet Union's leadership of the communist world. Since America had not been directly devastated by the ravages of World War II, our economy bounced right back and we were able to get Europe and Japan back on their feet again with generous policies such as the Marshall Plan. From the 1950s through (arguably) the end of the century, American manufacturing dominated most industries. So our political leader was not just the de jure leader of the United States but, by extension, the de facto leader of the free world as well. But Donald Trump has now left this reputation in tatters. The only superlative left to call ourselves is now "the world's best bad example."
The more time goes on, the more evidence stacks up that Donald Trump is simply incapable of performing the basic duties of a United States president. What is the president's job, boiled down? To process incoming problems and information, make policy decisions, and then implement those decisions. Trump fails spectacularly on all three legs of this stool on a regular basis. But this week has been really notable, due to Trump's utter failure to defend the Constitution of the United States (and the country at large, of course) against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Every so often I like to tempt fate by writing an article which could easily (and monumentally) be proven wrong within mere hours. Today is one of those days, because I feel pretty confident in predicting that Colorado and Utah will essentially show the rest of the country how a mail-in election should be done. I seriously doubt we'll see scenes of frustrated voters not being able to cast their ballots in a timely way, because with universal mail-in voting, that's not really a problem. No long lines, no machines that don't work right, no poll workers who don't know how to operate the machines, no voter-suppression efforts (both overt and covert) at all. And while Colorado is at the end of a long journey from being a purple state to a very blue one, Utah is still about as staunchly Republican as it gets -- proving that mail-in voting is not a partisan issue at all. Or it shouldn't be, at the very least.
With President Donald Trump at the reins, Americans are always facing new and ever-more-frightening questions about how his administration works (as opposed to the way the federal government is supposed to work, of course). With the new reports of the Russians paying the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, we are all now faced with another such question. Was the president briefed about this situation and then refused to do anything about it, was the president not briefed about a situation involving Russia paying for American soldiers' deaths, or was the president briefed on paper -- but just never read it? None of those answers is very comforting, for different (but equally frightening) reasons.
America, led by President Donald Trump and (mostly) Republican governors across the country, launched a grand experiment a few months back. Rather than following guidelines and milestones recommended by top epidemiologists, each state would reopen its economy as it saw fit. If your governor felt comfortable enough with the state of things, then the doors would be thrown open. This all started just before Memorial Day weekend, when Trump decided he was bored with the pandemic. And now it's becoming pretty obvious that this experiment has failed, and failed badly. And tens of thousands of Americans are paying a very steep price for this exercise in unfounded optimism.