WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With less than 80 days to go before the US presidential election, it looks like Joe Biden’s race to lose.
PHILO PHOTO: Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden signs official documents needed to receive his party’s official nomination next week at an event in Wilmington, Delaware, US, August 14, 2020. REUTERS / Carlos Barria
However, as Democrats gather nationwide online this week to nominate him as their party’s choice to challenge President Donald Trump on Nov. 3, many fear Biden may simply do so – for factors that are almost entirely are out of his control.
The former vice president and his allies have every reason to be bullish. Polls show that Biden has built an expansive lead in almost every battlefield state that Trump narrowly won in 2016, as Republican approval numbers tower amid the coronavirus pandemic. For the first time in a decade, the resumption of the Senate – and complete control over Congress – is in sight.
Yet interviews with more than a dozen Democratic officials, activists and voters revealed deep fears that Trump will make the vote as difficult as possible during the pandemic, and if he loses the vote, he will not accept the outcome.
Biden himself called it his greatest fear. Former President Barack Obama sounded the alarm Friday, saying on Twitter that the Trump administration “is more concerned with suppressing the vote than suppressing a virus.” And eight out of 10 Democrats are worried about voter oppression, according to a Reuters / Ipsos poll in late July.
Trump has been voting against the vote for months, without proving that it will lead to fraud, and on Thursday only acknowledged that he blocked Democratic demands for additional funding for the post office because of his opposition to post-voting.
“We can not predict what will happen other than the closer we get to the election, the more desperate Trump and his campaign will become,” said Rodell Mollineau, an adviser to Unite the Country, a political action committee that supports Biden. .
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said the president wanted a “free and fair” election, adding that it was Democrats who were inviting “chaos and the very real possibility of fraud” by trying to get the vote to expand by post.
Democrats and suffrage groups say that voting by mail could protect voters from the coronavirus, and that a failure to guarantee this option during the pandemic will destroy millions of Americans, especially the poor and African Americans who tend to to vote democratically.
Some say that Biden’s commander only makes them more nervous in the interviews. They are concerned that growing cases of COVID-19 voters could keep voters away from polling stations, especially if Biden is considered a coast guard after an easy win.
“If Biden goes up by 10 points, how likely are you then to risk your life to pull that lever,” said Stefan Smith, who was a top digital strategist for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.
Around this time in 2016, then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had a five-point lead in several polls and lost the election three more months later, in part due to the first decline in African-American turnout in 20 years.
Michigan Democrat Patty Leitzel, who lives in politically divided Macomb County, said she is still traumatized by the gains Trump made in her state four years ago and worries he could do it again – like the voters they regularly chat with.
Leitzel, who was county president for the Clinton campaign, has been telephone banking and organizing virtual house parties on behalf of Biden. “If I had Biden’s ear, I would tell him this: do not follow the election,” she said.
WHAT AUGUST LEAD WANTS TO DO
Like most Democrats, Leitzel is his biggest concern about voter oppression. But she said she would also like to see Biden make a bigger effort to get his message out so that the election depends less on Trump’s performance in office.
Democrats fear the race has become too focused on Trump’s handling of the pandemic. That has worked in Biden’s favor so far, but has also left him vulnerable to a sudden shift in the land of fortune, as the economy greatly improved in the run-up to the election as a vaccine for coronavirus became available, say se.
“These changes could limit the race,” said Geoffrey Skelley, an election analyst for FiveThirtyEight, a website that analyzes polls. “Because the president generally polls better in the states that are most likely to decide the election than he does nationally, he does not necessarily have to back down so much to increase his chances of winning in the Electoral College. to improve. ”
Murtaugh said Democrats wanted the country to remain in desperate shape through the election. “President Trump is looking forward to our continued recovery, but Joe Biden is afraid it is,” he said.
Biden has taken a much more cautious stance than Trump on reopening the economy and reiterating several times the need to follow public health guidelines.
He will almost certainly accept his presidential nomination from his home state of Delaware, while Trump plans a visit this week to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania, all politically competitive states.
The local efforts of the Biden campaign have also largely gone digital. The Trump campaign, however, says it knocks on one million doors a week.
The wisdom of each approach of each site will not be known until election day. But Biden allies are well aware that a margin of 10 points in August does not guarantee a win in November.
At a July 30 fundraiser, Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, raised the spectacle of the Atlanta Falcons, the National Football League team that shared a 25-point lead in 2017 to losing the championship game.
“We’re not going to be halfway through 28 to 3 at the Super Bowl and be our lead awake,” Richmond said. “We will continue to push, and we will continue to work.”
Report by James Oliphant; Edited by Soyoung Kim and Daniel Wallis
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