Do not underestimate the Democrats’ ability to scare off the voters their party will need to win in November.
If you visited Wisconsin in the days before the 2016 election, the pattern was crystal clear. In the cities there was no change, apart from the odd Hillary Clinton poster in the windows close to the center. In the suburbs and out of town, Donald Trump signs and, ”white lives,” “all lives” and “blue lives” (the police) signs filled lawns everywhere.
”It is a movement!” was something Trump used to say, and he was right, even if you did not get it at the time. The United States has a population of 330 million, and in 2016, the experts were estimating that the Democrats’ chance of winning was 90 percent certain all the way into election night.
Wisconsin was deemed so safe that Clinton did not even go there, but the state chose the Republicans and, thereby, practically made Trump president.
Fast forward four years and much is the same. The Democrats can just smell victory and are starting to get overconfident. The experts are estimating Joe Biden’s chance of winning at 90 percent, and nobody is visiting Wisconsin.
This is all, of course, due to COVID-19. The pandemic has turned most things upside down, the economy is in crisis and the president’s poll results are weak. In the sprawling suburbs, where American elections are decided and Trump won big four years ago, Biden is in the lead by 20 percentage points.
A lot is pointing towards the Democrats even having figured Texas out, which, if true, almost guarantees a victory.
However, there are reasons not to be convinced that Biden’s victory is secure. Opinion polls and journalists never managed to capture the public sentiment in 2016. And this year’s election is like none before it, making it difficult to interpret.
In an interesting interview in The Atlantic, Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell talks about seeing similar trends to four years ago. Then, the Democrats had a substantial lead in Michigan, but the Republicans won for the first time in 30 years, just like in Wisconsin on the other side of the lake.
Now, the Democrats are once again in the lead and the polls don’t make any sense, Dingell says. Her district covers the progressive university town Dearborn, where there is a large Middle Eastern population, as well as the old industrial towns around the Detroit river, where the working class is white and the majority voted for Trump.
The president has not lost those voters; rather the opposite, says Dingell, who went to a neighborhood the other day and counted 100 Blue Lives Matter signs. She cites the ”confession,” a famous post from social media that has spread like wildfire this summer:
“I used to think I was pretty much just a regular person. But I was born white into a two-parent household, which now labels me as privileged, racist and responsible for slavery. I’m a fiscal and moral conservative, which by today’s standards makes me a fascist because I plan a budget. But I now find out that I’m not here because I earned it, but because I was advantaged … I think and I reason, and I doubt much of what the mainstream media tells me, which makes me a right-wing conspiracy nut. I’m proud of my heritage and our inclusive American culture. It makes me a xenophobe.”
”That’s what I’m worried about,” Dingell says.
It is not so strange. The feeling of being an outsider and the anger is real, just like the opinion censorship.
According to a poll several weeks ago, 60 percent of Americans polled no longer wanted to share their political views in public. Every other ”very convinced” Democrat believed that colleagues who support Trump financially should get fired, in other words be punished for their political view.
It is crazy and sad. Hopefully, the Biden campaign will get a handle on this and voice this issue, but who knows. The other day, prospective vice presidential candidate Tammy Duckworth said she was open to removing statues of George Washington.
Never underestimate the Democrats’ ability to mess up an election.
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