Joe Biden’s growing lead over Donald Trump in national polls ahead of the 2020 presidential election makes sense if you think most Americans would prefer a leader who is willing and able to do something about an out-of-control pandemic and a crashing economy.
Nationally, Biden is about ten percentage points ahead of Trump, on average. But don’t forget that in the mid-summer of 2016, Hillary Clinton held a seven-point lead over the same bloviating orange imposter.
Day by day, Trump seems to be unraveling. His meandering, narcissistic Rose Garden campaign speech; his insistence that schools fully open in the fall, whatever the consequences; and his helpless, scattered appearance before a half-empty stadium in Tulsa, Oklahoma, all add up to a long downhill slide. And that’s leaving aside the racist attacks on protesters of police violence, who a majority of Americans support, and all the crazy talk about China.
The man has cracked. He’s unpresidential. His administration is an unmitigated disaster. Why do we keep rediscovering these facts?
Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, was able to rack up a double-digit lead that has held through most of the summer just by staying in his basement and letting Trump run to the end of his rope.
Nationally, Biden is about ten percentage points ahead of Trump, on average. But don’t forget that in the mid-summer of 2016, Hillary Clinton held a seven-point lead over the same bloviating orange imposter.
In fact, the current state of the 2020 election is scarily similar to where things were in 2016. A majority of Americans are hoping that Trump can’t really win, because it seems incredible that he could. (Let’s be honest, many of us are still incredulous that he won the last time.)
Progressives disappointed by the outcome of the Democratic primary are being urged to unify, lest the feckless unreliables the party depends on to vote show themselves to be feckless and unreliable once again. At least Biden, in his meetings with his more progressive rivals and other progressive organizations, seems to be making an effort to appeal to younger voters instead of the usual eat-your-vegetables approach.
That’s progress.
I don’t question the wisdom of doing everything possible to get out the vote against Donald Trump. I personally would vote for a rock in my backyard over Trump. But I am kind of amazed that this is where we are, with a lackluster candidate running a stay-at-home campaign during a time of unprecedented national and global crisis.
Will young, idealistic voters who were energized by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders get up off the couch for Biden? This is the same question I asked about Clinton—and was roundly condemned for raising (by Jonathan Chait among others)—in 2016.
It has never been more obvious that the boldest progressive policy prescriptions of recent years are not just nice ideas but urgently needed. The pandemic has been exacerbated by the neglect of our public health care system, our lack of universal health care, family leave, living wages, and other protections for workers in the high-wire gig economy. We are reaching the point of no return on climate meltdown without a serious effort to address climate change. The fact that we live in a vastly unfair society characterized by ever-growing economic inequality, brutal systemic racism, and killer cops has been forced out into the open after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. All of this is abundantly clear not just to an in-group of progressive activists but to a whole broad swath of the voting public.
So what are we doing? We’re rerunning the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016, which was very similar to the Al Gore campaign of 2000. We are hoping young people will get out and vote in spite of, not because of, the candidate.
I hope so, too. But when I tuned in to Biden’s “rural issues round- table,” hosted by U.S. Representative Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin—a discussion of the concerns of an important swing demographic in this crucial swing state—I was underwhelmed.
Biden praised Kind and the panel members for being people whose judgment “comes from their gut” instead of their heads—an odd opener for the candidate running against President Gut.
He was long on empathy (not since Bill Clinton have we heard so much about a candidate’s empathy) but short on the history of the policies that created rural people’s problems in the first place.
Biden noted that Wisconsin ranks number one among the states for farm bankruptcies and said, “We can’t ignore the crisis that was already taking shape in rural America before the virus hit.”
“How many farmers would be in a better spot if their profits hadn’t vanished, because Trump goaded our trade partners into placing brutal tariffs on American cheese?” he said.
He promoted his “rural economic opportunity agenda,” including support for biofuels as well as a $20 billion investment in rural broadband. He touted Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin’s effort to help stabilize rural economies by shoring up food supply chains disrupted by this pandemic.
That’s all fine and good. But where was Biden when farmers were hurting during the Obama years?
As Darin Von Ruden, president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, pointed out during the meeting, overproduction is at the root of the farm crisis. The Farmers Union is calling for a supply management system like our country had in the 1930s, to support local food economies.
Biden ignored all of that. He made it sound as if the farm crisis began with Trump.
Wisconsin farmers know that is not true.
Trade deals supported by Democrats, including NAFTA, and a Democratic Party that hasn’t been particularly attuned to or interested in the needs of rural people, are what propelled many Wisconsin farmers to vote for Trump in the first place.
Biden agreed with some of the roundtable participants who have had trouble getting relief from the federal government during the pandemic. “What I call the corrupt recovery,” he said, “is focusing on helping the wealthy and the well-connected, not the millions of mom-and-pops facing financial ruin.”
“Wall Street is getting too much,” he added. “Wall Street didn’t build America. I’ve been saying this for thirty-five years.”
Wisconsin dairy farmer Jim Goodman wasn’t buying it. After the roundtable, he noted that Biden “told Wall Street that if he is elected basically nothing will change for them. He has always supported Wall Street and the big banks in Delaware, I don’t believe him.”
Biden contrasted the current administration’s oversight of small-business recovery funds with the Obama Administration’s stewardship of recovery money after the 2008 financial crisis.
But bailing out the banks didn’t save farmers or low-wage workers.
Von Ruden agreed with Biden that Trump’s trade wars hurt farmers, but he went further, reminding him that during the Obama Administration there was a task force that looked into monopolies and antitrust issues. Nothing came of it.
That’s not to say Biden won’t be better than Trump for farmers if elected. He would. Trump has been a disaster for rural and urban America alike
But now more than ever, we need transformative, visionary leadership.
That’s not just pie-in-the-sky progressive idealism, as Democrats said about Ralph Nader in 2000 and Sanders in 2016. It’s actually urgent. If Biden is the vehicle, so be it. But it’s clear he is going to need someone at the steering wheel and a whole lot of people behind him giving him a very hard push.
It’s possible that the country can unite behind anyone-but-Trump. Even Trump’s base is showing signs that it has had enough. Even hardcore red-state voters are appalled by how the Trump Administration’s pandemic response is following a careful recipe for disaster: Deny the pandemic, partially close, reopen too soon, let infections spike—all of which causes more economic calamity as people stay home anyway and businesses suffer.
If current predictions of a major economic slump extending well into the fall come true, all Biden might have to do to win is stay alive.
Here in Wisconsin, we finally got rid of Republican Governor Scott Walker when state schools superintendent Tony Evers, a mild-mannered if not super exciting older white candidate, beat him by fewer than 30,000 votes. It was part of the Blue Wave of 2018, when Democrats won in red states across the land, including every statewide race in Wisconsin.
Unfortunately, Wisconsin Republicans have managed to maintain control, thanks to what is arguably the most gerrymandered political map in the nation.
Even before the newly elected Evers and a Democratic attorney general took office, Republican legislative leaders set about usurping their powers. They also overturned the governor’s “Safer at Home” order, as part of their mission to make his job impossible.
That is the fate Biden will face, too, if Democrats don’t retake the Senate. Maybe not focusing on the top of the ticket is a brilliant strategy for Democrats. Never mind Biden v. Trump. Getting Mitch McConnell out of office is what really matters.