What if 2016 Was Just About Being Lucky?

President Donald Trump (R-FL)

All right, so I haven't mentioned too much about the status of Donald Trump and his campaign since last week's horror show of a debate, followed by the cascade of Republican heavy-hitters that were diagnosed with Covid, including the President and First Lady.  Trump's behavior in the past week has been shocking, and it's the sort of shocking that even for Trump is worth noting.  I have to think that his decision to go to Walter Reed, and then quickly come back was against medical advice, particularly considering his age/weight and that he was on oxygen as late as Friday.  The obvious lies coming from Dr. Sean Conley's press conference, where they even admitted that they didn't speak the truth about the president being on oxygen, made the situation exponentially worse.  For all of the worry about Joe Biden's age & performance at the debate, the reality is that Biden is (knock on wood), just fine right now, while Trump is in a precarious medical situation, and the spin coming out is not only unbelievable but also absurd.  Biden stopped airing negative ads for the past few days, but turn on the news, and all you see are negative ads as recognizable mask-less Republicans are diagnosed with a deadly illness they've spent months claiming was an unserious hoax.  Trump might get his Supreme Court justice, but he's going to get her looking like a fool, and likely losing reelection.  And it's worth remembering-Trump is not Mitch McConnell, he does not care about issues or legacy-he only cares about himself.  If he thought it would've helped his reelection effort, he would've waited on Amy Coney Barrett's appointment, and likely only is rushing her through in hopes of him winning a Bush vs. Gore situation after the election (something that is unlikely to happen if there's no legal ground for him to stage such a lawsuit).

But Trump's behavior calls into question one of the bigger issues we have with the Trump administration-that we attribute caginess to his decisions that aren't there.  Pundits fall for this all-the-time (I'm not immune), assuming that there must be some sort of perverse logic to Trump's decisions.  The reason that we do this is simple-Trump won in 2016, against all odds, against every pundit's predictions (including mine).  But as the past four years have worn on, as we have seen him continually defy norms & gain power due to Mitch McConnell's destruction of Senate traditions, it's become clear that 2016 was less a moment of genius, and more a moment of luck.  Donald Trump has never had a success as strong as he did in 2016 in the four years he's been in power.  Trump rode to power in 2016 on the wave of an unpopular Democratic nominee, an electorate that assumed he couldn't win, and a hidden wave of white supremacy & racial animus that Trump spoke to in a way no presidential candidate has dared since George Wallace.

The fact that none of those things is duplicated in 2020 isn't surprising.  The Democrats learned from their mistakes.  You talk to any elections strategist or pundit, and they will always add in that "Trump could still win" as if it's a superstition similar to knocking on wood after positively predicting the future.  None of them are assuming he can't win, and have voted all year as if they are practicing for November 3rd.  The Democratic nominee is also the antithesis of Hillary Clinton in terms of politics.  Clinton, an eloquent stateswoman more attuned to the long hours of government life, has been countered with affable everyman Joe Biden.  She's Ivy League, he's the scrappy kid from Scranton.  Whereas Clinton was uncomfortable with the press & in a crowd, Biden eats that up.  One could make an argument that the Democrats' problem in 2016 was that Clinton wasn't liberal enough, but Obama & Bill Clinton proved that's not a problem, and also Biden is liberal in a moderate package.  He's also male, and while I don't think that that was what caused Clinton to lose in 2016 (I think it was more her being Hillary Clinton), the Democrats' dismissal of Elizabeth Warren & Amy Klobuchar seems that they weren't taking any chances.  And while in 2016 we were still hearing about Bernie Sanders & his fight with the DNC, Sanders quickly got behind Biden & there's no sign of discord within the party.  There is a sense that even if you don't like Biden, you shut up about it until after he wins.

Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE)

Even the white supremacist angle can't be duplicated for Trump this cycle, mostly because everyone knows now that Trump's "coded" language isn't so much coded as it is an outright racist cry.  His inability to denounce white supremacy at the debates was the last straw in that regard, and after the riots & protests that resulted in the wake of the murders of George Floyd & Breonna Taylor, Trump's assumption that "law & order" (a thinly-veiled attempt to draw on racial prejudice) would work on college-educated whites in the suburbs isn't working.  Sure, white supremacists love Trump...but in the process Trump has gotten the much larger amount of the population that aren't white supremacists to go toward his opponent.

This wouldn't be a problem if Trump had new aces up his sleeve, but in terms of elections strategy, he's got nothing.  Trump could have won this election in February by handling Covid seriously, but he didn't, and lost senior citizens in the process.  His hope of linking moderate Democrats to the "Defund the Police" movement didn't work either, likely because he did little to curb the violence that was ravaging major American cities other than assign blame (rather than help).  Two of the states most affected by riots, Wisconsin & Minnesota, have become increasingly out-of-reach in polls.  And his anti-mask crusade now looks both dangerous (as parents find themselves not knowing if their kid will be going to school tomorrow, or be carrying home an outbreak) and foolish (considering how many prominent Republicans got the disease).  The fact is that while Trump's base is still with him, that's only about 35-40% of the country-unlike 2016 he's not attracting curious or soft Trump voters, and more-and-more as Biden creeps back into double digit popular vote margins, it feels like those voters don't think they can risk another four years of Trump, and are willing to vote for Biden to get there even if this is a "one-time" pull of the lever for a Democrat (we'll figure that out after the election).

If you take away the angle of "secret genius" from the Trump administration, several of their other recent decisions feel incredibly dangerous or stupid rather than canny.  Mike Pence hitting the campaign trails while President Trump is hospitalized is needlessly risky.  It makes it look like they're so far behind they are willing to risk Pence's health, knowing that if he were to become incapacitated by Covid, Nancy Pelosi would briefly become the president, and pull the ACB nomination instantaneously.  It also makes their bizarre advertising decisions perhaps look like incompetence or bad money management.  Going off the air in Iowa or Ohio might be attributed to the Republicans knowing "if we're losing there, we've already lost," and therefore the money is best spent in states that matter like Pennsylvania & Florida...but Occum's Razor if you don't assume that Trump is some savant is that they are just poorly managing their money, a fact borne out by Biden clobbering Trump in recent fundraising.  And while this is just speculation, looking at Trump's tax returns, it appears that money management & potential misuse of said money is a Trump Family hobby.

Trump could still win.  Luck sometimes strikes twice, and he's technically got a path, if a narrower one than in 2016.  But right now, the only thing you could look at the Trump campaign and think "that's their ace in the hole" is the judiciary, and that's not going to work if Trump loses by more than a state or two.  Sure, they could try and stop the counts in some states, but enough states will have strong ideas of how they're voting by Election Night that we'll know where this election is headed unless it's 2000/2016 close (which polls don't indicate it will be).  The Supreme Court might be conservative, but they know that to side with Trump with no credence would be akin to signing the country into a Civil War (that's not hyperbole, it's probably where we'd head if the Court overturned a clear Biden victory).  Trump will likely never concede, but while it's easy to find doomsday in such a scenario, the past week has shown that perhaps we should just assume the most logical solution-Trump is all talk, and will slip, grumbling into the night, possibly fleeing the country as he awaits a sure series of financial & legal disputes.

The Republicans will get their nomination to the Supreme Court, but they'll do so by risking their entire party, not just in spirit, but also in literal body-it's probable that at least one of the headline-name people who contracted Covid as a result of this will suffer serious medical complications, possibly even death, and it will have been with (most likely) a humiliating, 2008-style defeat.  The past week has shown that the Republicans have nothing more than luck to run on, and while luck can be a winning strategy for a party...can you remember the last time the Republicans were able to get a little bit of luck & use it wisely?