The usually reliable website FiveThirtyEight, which uses averages of multiple polls to get a broad snapshot of the country, currently ranks Joe Biden as the favorite in November, putting his victory at a seventy three percent probability. To those of us longing for a return to sanity in the White House, this is good news, and his pick of the popular senator Kamala Harris as his running mate should give him a boost. The fact that Trump has already despicably latched onto yet another birther conspiracy concerning Harris's ability to run (she can) shows how scared he is.
But just because Biden is the favorite doesn't mean he will win. Remember, Hillary Clinton was also favored in twenty sixteen. While there's little chance of Trump winning the popular vote, he may very well win the electoral college again. Consider that he is currently (and admittedly!) defunding the post office as a way to tamp down the number of people voting by mail, which he thinks will benefit him (although there's some debate about that). And that the conservative governors and legislators around the country will do all they can to try and suppress the votes in non white communities to try to help him. They're even pushing to have rapper Kanye West's name put on the ballot in swing states, in an absurd attempt to push the black vote away from Biden!
Speaking of race, a recent Newsweek poll says that fifty percent of white people in this country are planning to vote for Trump. On the one hand this number makes me gasp and wonder just what Trump has to do to lose the white vote, given his utterly disastrous handling of the coronavirus. On the other hand, Biden getting half of the white vote would be an improvement over the usual numbers that Democratic presidential candidates get. Barack Obama won twice without winning the white vote, so even only half of white voters voting for Biden is good thing, even though I struggle to understand how anyone could vote for Trump.
So what if he does win? It will be utterly demoralizing to progressives like me, as Trump will continue to pack the judiciary with conservative judges who will be able to make decisions for decades. Roe vs Wade could be overturned and gay rights gains could be rolled back across the nation. And his dismantling of any kind of response to the onset of climate change will continue, as will his xenophobic assault on immigration. America's standing in the world will sink even lower as he inevitably will insult our allies and embrace dictators as he has already for the past four years. And with no real restraints, his corruption will go on unabated, as his own party will, as always, confuse to condemn him as uses his position of power to line his own family's pockets and go after his perceived enemies. And the nightmare gets worse as his children start to consider running themselves in later elections!
But there is one thing that even Trump's victory can't stop: the changing demographics of the American public. Recently, former Republican consultant Stuart Stevens has been giving interviews in which he bluntly admits that the Republican party has been all about exploiting racism for decades, with Trump's full throated bigotry being the inevitable result. He also points that accepting Trump's bigotry is no plan for the future, stating that right now in the US, a majority of children under the age of fifteen are not white, and that even among white people, younger voters are becoming more progressive. And those young people will be growing up knowing that the Republican party is one that has embraced a man who entered into politics through birtherism and went on to rule as an openly racist and misogynistic president. These young people will eventually form the same kind of coalition that put Obama in the White House for eight years. Putting it bluntly, even if getting behind Trump wins the White House for the Republicans for four more years, their party will be tarred just by associating with him, as they should be. No amount of voter suppression and gerrymandering can prevent what is coming for the Republican party, which will have to change soon or risk becoming irrelevant. Harnessing white rage has worked for the party since Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, but it won't last forever. American will become a more fair and just society someday in the future, even if Trump wins four more years. You can count on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment