Scattered thoughts accumulating amid the torrent of news.
1. I keep reading the hot take that the veep selection “doesn’t
matter.” This is an over-reading of historical data. We have never had a
candidate a third of the electorate sees as having cognitive decline,
who will be 78 years old when he takes office, and who is almost
certainly not going to be able to serve 2 terms. He is very likely
hiring his replacement, someone who will take over in his first term or
run in 2024. Sarah Palin mattered a great deal. This pick is not nuthin.
2. Trump is in massive trouble. We’re seeing the convergence of
several trends that are likely to worsen, not improve, before
Election Day: the coronavirus and his handling of it; the long-term
effects of the economic collapse (all of the govt support will end
before the election); elite GOP support; Trump’s own personal behavior.
For example, in the past week he’s retweeted white supremacists, said
things are “very good with the coronavirus,” twice failed to say what
he’ll do in a second term, and is almost certainly lying about the
Russian bounties. He’s running in a nakedly white supremacist ticket in a
year when Americans are shocked by structural racism, and is beset by
corruption, incompetence, and miscues at every step.
I know
people are thinking he has some magic dust (and the electoral college
does legitimately favor him), but the window has shifted in the past
four months. Then the range of possibilities was a modest Biden win on
one side to a modest Trump win on the other. Now Trump has to hope for
the barest of EC wins (he’ll certainly lose the popular vote)—and the
chance of a Biden landslide (400+ EV) grows. When the battleground moves
to TX, Trump is screwed.
3. I have long assumed this election
would be marred by widespread GOP efforts to repress the vote.
Republicans knee coming in that Trump’s margin was thin, and they’d want
to give him every chance to eke out a win. If he enters the fall down a
dozen points, trailing in FL, OH, AZ, NC, GA, and TX, I wonder. Every
state has its own local calculations, and the worst offenders will
continue to pursue efforts to suppress the vote. But nationally, the GOP
may see that rigging an election they’re about to lose badly would only
compound the disaster.
4. The chance that Trump bails before
the election is not identical to zero. He’s a quitter. As a conman and
grifter, he knows that there comes a time to pack up the snake oil and
get out of town. His mental health is fragile, and I wonder whether his
ego can handle getting crushed in an election. Isn’t it at least
plausible that he might declare America already great, claim the deep
state and media are rigged against him, and decline to run?
5. I
have been so energized and excited by the activists protesting
structural racism in the United States. This has been such a terrible
stain on our body politic, a darkness we carried into everything we did.
The currents of the modern Republican Party, from John Birch to
Goldwater to Reagan, have all been shot-through with a kind of racial
revanchism that sought to launder hate into heritage. It’s so long past
due that we owned up to our history, made restitution, and abandoned the
legacy of white supremacy. That a Trump administration would end in
mass protests for racial justice and polling showing large majorities
supporting them—it fills me with joy. So much work left to do, but this
moment is so important, so powerful.
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