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WWith more than 18 million votes already cast, Donald Trump is struggling to find a coherent closing argument for the US presidential election, as opinion polls put him in danger of a humiliating defeat from Democrat Joe Biden.
Long lines have formed across the country for early voting in person, a sign that this year could see record turnout despite, or perhaps because of, a coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 215,000 Americans and has left millions out of work.
But there could still be surprises ahead of Election Day on November 3, and fears persist that in the event of a Biden victory, Trump could plunge the world’s oldest constitutional democracy into crisis by contesting the outcome in court. , spread conspiracy theories online and mobilize party militants. on the streets.
Biden leads by 17 percentage points in an Opinium Research / Guardian poll, 16 points in a CNN poll and 11 points in an NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll. The last sitting president to suffer such deficits was the last sitting president to lose: George HW Bush, defeated by Bill Clinton in 1992.
Biden’s consistent lead includes the crucial decisive states that will decide the most important electoral college and raises the possibility that Democrats could win back the White House and Senate and expand their majority in the House of Representatives.
“Trump is going to be assassinated,” he said. Joe Walsh, a former congressman who unsuccessfully challenged the president in this year’s Republican primaries. “I think we will know the night of the election that he lost. Republicans are going to lose the Senate. It will probably be the highest turnout in a hundred years in this country and it will be a bloodbath for Republicans. “
Trump appears to be losing support between two crucial voting blocs. One is older people, who were crucial to her victory over Hillary Clinton in states like Florida in 2016. Walsh added: “One of the great stories that we will analyze after this election will be that Trump lost the older voters in this country. .
“He beat Hillary when it comes to older voters, but Biden will win them by a good chunk because they think Trump is a fucking lunatic who ruined this pandemic in a big way and a lot of older Americans died.”
The other group that defected from Trump are suburban women, apparently rejecting his vulgar insults and displays of machismo regarding the virus. With a touch of desperation this week at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the president pleaded: “Women from the suburbs, would you please? Please please. I saved your fucking neighborhood, okay?
Trump seemed confident of re-election earlier in the year based on his economic record, but Covid-19, and its persistent downplay, wreaked havoc. The president himself was hospitalized with the virus earlier this month, but has since recovered and returned to the campaign.
But their rallies don’t absorb media coverage the way they used to, with some commentators suggesting that the carnival barker act, so novel in 2016, has become routine and even boring. His need to keep them in states like Iowa and Georgia, traditionally safe Republican territory, suggests he’s on the defensive. Speaking in North Carolina on Thursday, he pointed skyward and joked, “We need help from the boss.”
Biden, a former senator who served as vice president to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017, came from behind to win the Democratic primary nomination and, amid America’s intertwined health, economic and racial crises, has maintained an advantage in the remarkably stable polls on Trump. Their low-key campaign with much smaller events seems to be working.
Walsh commented: “Joe Biden has ignored Twitter, which is brilliant. His people have kept their heads down, campaigned responsibly within this pandemic, and let Donald Trump go for it every day. Biden has slowly built trust with the vast majority of the American people and will give him a great victory. “
The 74-year-old Trump has tried to portray the 77-year-old Biden as a decadent mind and a puppet of the radical left. This week, he tweeted a doctored image of Biden in a wheelchair in a nursing home, saying, “Simply put, it’s a choice between a socialist nightmare and the American dream.”
But the “Sleepy Joe” branding appears to have been a poor sequel to “Crooked Hillary” and Biden has been harder to demonize than the widely unpopular Clinton. Trump has also struggled to shift the topic from the pandemic to “culture wars” or law and order, but the virus has proven to be a relentless enemy.
His campaign has been as chaotic as it was in 2016. His manager, Brad Parscale, was demoted and then resigned after being hospitalized following reports that he threatened to harm himself at his Florida home. The campaign has been forced to pull advertising from the battlefield states after running out of cash, even as Biden breaks fundraising records.
And Trump, who made populist notes on immigration and trade in 2016, has steadily gone off script this year. Only in October has he pushed forward a conspiracy theory that calls into question the death of Osama bin Laden, criticized America’s leading infectious disease expert, described Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris as a “monster” and, in the town hall events with Biden on Thursday night, failed to overrule the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York, said: “It’s been terrible, especially lately, because Trump himself just has no discipline and no control. He is alienating people from left to right and it doesn’t seem like he is actively trying to win this. In reality, it almost seems as if it is self-sabotaging or simply denying itself in some way and that is not where a winning candidate or strategy comes from. “
Biden, he added, benefited from coping with part of the pandemic by conducting interviews and fundraisers from his basement at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. “The fact that the Democrats kept him in the basement for so long was actually a bonus for him. Since he’s been away from home he’s been relatively bug-free, solid, and stable, and I think that’s what people are looking for right now, as opposed to the craziness of what’s going on with Trump these days. ” .
More than 18 million people have voted so far, according to data compiled by the US Election Project. Democrats outnumbered Republicans on mail-in ballots in Florida by more than 400,000 as of Wednesday morning. But there have been few signs of complacency from Democrats, with memories still fresh from 2016, when many state polls were wrong.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, warned Twitter followers: “Early voting is already underway in many states. Millions of voters have already cast their votes. But there is still a long way to go in this campaign, and we believe this race is much closer than what the people on this website think. Like much closer. “
As time runs out, Trump could become even more reckless in his efforts to alter the trajectory of the race. During a virtual fundraiser on Thursday, Biden warned his supporters that the president “will throw everything at me but the kitchen sink” and deliver “an overwhelming torrent of lies.”
Biden’s son Hunter came under new scrutiny after a New York Post report described an email Hunter allegedly received from a Ukrainian businessman about a meeting with his father. Biden’s campaign denied that the meeting had happened, and experts raised questions about the veracity of the emails.
Election watchdogs remain vigilant for signs of voter suppression or intimidation. Trump has spent months making unsubstantiated claims to discredit mail-in voting, which research suggests is more likely to be used by Democrats than Republicans. The president has also refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, fueling concerns about weeks of legal wrangling and potentially explosive street protests. When asked about this in town hall Thursday night, he was still somewhat ambiguous. “They talk about, ‘Will you accept a peaceful transfer?’ And the answer is yes, I will, but I want it to be an honest choice, just like everyone else. “
Activist groups are preparing to protect the earl’s integrity. Sarah Dohl, Indivisible Co-Founder and Acting Campaign Manager, said: “With every tweet and every refusal to commit to accepting legitimate election results, Trump is trying to stoke chaos and fear. It’s all that is left in your playbook. But we are ready.
“If Trump declares victory before all the votes are counted or if he avoids legitimate vote counting, we will mobilize in every corner of this country to make sure voters have the last word in November.”
Democrats have argued that the best antidote is to win by such a huge margin that the result is indisputable. Such an outcome, once considered highly unlikely, is now at least possible now that Trump’s candidacy threatens to implode.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Trump has run the worst presidential campaign in modern American history. Biden has an advantage that is beyond the margin of error and I consider those numbers to be real.
“There is nothing in favor of Trump that is going to shake the election. You need a hydrogen bomb to explode. The election seems to be almost frozen. It’s remarkable when you look at the survey averages, you go state by state, it’s pretty consistent, and there aren’t many ups and downs. So for me, this election is practically over. “
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