CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM

     On July twenty ninth, President Donald Trump  tweeted  out this message: "With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???".  His constant unproven charges of voter fraud and desire to move the election prove one thing:  he knows that he's losing.

    Yes, if the presidential election were held today, there's almost no chance that Trump would win.  While we all don't want to make the same  mistake we did in twenty sixteen and say that Biden has it in the bag, the polls do look good for him.  As the website 538 recently posted, with less than a hundred days to the election, Biden's lead is now better than Clinton's was at her best.  There are a number of reasons for this, but to me it really shows that  the Democratic primary voters cynical decision to run an old white guy against an old white guy was correct.

    Are there ways that Biden could blow it before the election?  Sure, he could make one of his trademark verbal gaffes that winds up getting stuck in the media's spotlight, he could totally tank the debates, or some kind of "October Surprise"  could  arise, like the James Comey's memo about Clinton's emails.  And, of course, Russia is still on Trump's side and is actively working for him, no matter how much he denies it.  

    And then there are the ways that Trump could steal the election if it's close: his constant attacks on mail in voting means that he could legally contest results that don't go his way.  He might even try to slow down the post office as a way to throw out mail in votes that don't arrive on election day.  Really, with a human being as horrible as Trump, almost anything is possible. 

    Still, I'm cautiously optimistic that Biden will win, seeing as how the coronavirus is such a big,  tragic story that Trump's attempts at  media distraction will mostly be ignored as his usual bloviating by everyone outside of the right wing media bubble.  And only the most insanely loyal Trump supporter can say that he has handled the virus well with cases currently surging at over five million in this country, as other countries have already started to recover.  

    Hopefully, Biden will win big, so big that even Trump himself will struggle to argue with the result.  It's insane to think that a president who lost the popular vote by millions and has never had an approval rating over fifty percent will only lose if he is soundly defeated, but here we are.  With any luck, a few months from now Biden will begin the painful process of trying to undo the enormous damage the Trump administration has done to both this country and the world.