Commentary: The late breaks don’t seem to be falling Donald Trump’s way, so perhaps even Republican vote-suppression tactics won’t save him.
Polls have him well behind Joe Biden. Trump’s base still loves him; but he’s no longer a newcomer promising change. People have seen four years of mismanagement and illegality, beneath a thin veneer of bluster. He has a record now, notably his abject failure to deal with the pandemic; and Biden isn’t as unpopular as Hillary Clinton was.
The debates seemed a potential “Hail Mary,” but Trump aided Biden by feigning doubt Biden had sufficient stamina. That enhanced the effect of Biden’s energy and focus. Then Trump turned most everyone off by interrupting Biden and Chris Wallace constantly, without actually saying much, in what may have been a failed effort to induce Biden to stutter. Then Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, whose mere civility made both seem winners, yakked to sort of a draw. Harris “won” in the polls, though likely because she had more supporters going in.
Trump ducked the second debate because it would be “virtual.” But he needed it. Biden didn’t. And many folks might have felt like the friend who sent me a cartoon showing a mother working virtually at her computer, and a small child at her feet attending “virtual” school, and Trump saying he wouldn’t debate virtually. “If it’s good enough for my wife and daughter, why not for Donald?” my friend commented. The third debate might come too late, even if Trump could reshuffle his playbook.
Trump can’t reshuffle his playbook, to his party’s chagrin. While his base cheers his every mention of Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden, he’s losing Independents and crossover Democrats who know him better now. The “Best Hits of 2016” won’t cut it. Trump’s response is to waffle on white supremacy, feign ignorance of Q-Anon but praise its stand against pedophilia, and now float the idea that the raid that killed Ossama bin Laden was a hoax. Really?
His key points don’t appeal to non-base voters. The truth value of each is highly questionable. More important, they’re all in the past. They won’t help keep a virus-infected parent alive, or feed any of the millions who’ve slipped into poverty since the last stimulus payments.
Meanwhile, a lot of “red” states are giving Biden a look. They too have people dying. They too may be tired of the sheer noise of a Trump Presidency, more than any other in recent memory. They may have relatives and friends in the military, or themselves have served.
But the effort to skew or undermine the voting has many facets. Many swing states have “purged” more voters than they should have. In California, Republicans have insisted on using apparently illegal “voting collection boxes” which allegedly bear misleading “official” labels and lack safeguards against chicanery. In Texas, courts had to overrule the effort to allow only one absentee ballot box per county. In New Mexico, Republicans put out misleading voting information, perhaps accidentally.
The pandemic mandates more voting by mail. Trump and far-right groups are suing numerous states to make voting harder. As one conservative once told a group of evangelical leaders, “I don’t want everybody to vote [because] our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Repeated studies show “voter fraud” is extremely rare.
Whatever your personal take on the last four years is, please vote!