3l1n0r

[3l1n0r]

My Predictions for the 2020 Election

I predict that Joe Biden will win the nomination over Bernie Sanders, the only remaining candidate at this time. He will win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, and Trump will be re-elected. Here’s why:

I believe that if Bernie Sanders had gotten the nomination he would have won. But we’ll likely never know for sure. The Democratic establishment decided, and its voters along with it, that the best we could do against Trump was Joe Biden, arguably one of the weakest candidates in the race. 

Joe Biden is a far weaker candidate than Hillary Clinton before him, in a number of ways. He constantly makes mistakes and gaffes, has a history of touching women in ways that made them feel uncomfortable, has a less impressive resume with fewer accomplishments, had less support from the Democratic establishment (until the 11th hour face-turn between South Carolina and Super Tuesday), and clearly has dementia. While we will probably never get an official diagnosis of this, that won’t stop the Republicans from weaponizing it against him until at least a third of this country believes it to be fact. The situation with Hunter Biden in Ukraine will be Joe Biden’s “email scandal”; a situation in which he technically did nothing wrong (except some run-of-the-mill nepotism) but will be used to taint him with the stench of corruption. 

Joe Biden is perfectly poised to lose this election; we will get Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss all over again. All he really has going for him is his connection with Obama (which won’t win over the swing state voters who went for Trump), his resume (checkered with terrible decisions that will depress turnout overall) and his long-standing ties with the black community.  

It is not clear to me why so many black voters support Biden, given his terrible record on civil rights and his lies about protesting with Nelson Mandela. I believe it boils down to three things:

He was Obama’s VP, and did a good job of it

They know him

They don’t want to take any risks with an outsider leftist candidate

All of these are valid reasons. However, when pundits discuss Biden’s black support, or Sanders’ Latino support, they always ignore the most obvious factor: youth. Young voters of all races go for Sanders, olders voters of all races go for Biden. While Biden may have the support of the older black people, it is not enough to rebuild the Obama coalition that sent him to the White House. Youth was a key factor in Obama’s success, but the media’s continued dismissive attitude towards young people means that their voices are not taken seriously. (Part of this is on them, as most can’t be bothered to vote.)

I think that despite all of Biden’s obvious shortcomings, Democrats will turn out for him in a desperate attempt to unseat Donald Trump that won’t succeed. They will show up, yes, but months of the Fox News propaganda machine smearing Biden will depress turnout among young people, Bernie Sanders supporters of all ages, and possibly conservative-leaning independents as well. If Fox News can send the message to independents that Biden is just as bad, or worse, that Trump in just a few key swing states, the race will go to Trump once again.

Trump has the advantages of a mass-media propaganda machine behind him, and the incumbency. It is very likely with the coronavirus outbreak the economy will be in a recession, but Trump will pretend that such a recession is not happening and many of his supporters will believe him. He could tell them that the sky is orange and they would believe him, because he has dozens of pundits on channels broadcasting across the country arguing for why he is right and shooting down anyone who dares say otherwise. That being said, it is commonly believed that the economy is what decides presidential elections. 

If economy good=re-election. If economy bad=lose re-election. 

Of course, it can’t possibly be that simple. Even if the economy is doing well in the macroeconomic view, if small business and average workers are struggling (and they have been struggling for the past decade), they might be more willing to take a risk on an outsider like Trump and Sanders. This is why the economy is such a wild card. If the economy is doing well on the surface but struggling internally, it will completely pass most pundits by, and we get shock results like 2016. 

We are very likely to fall into a recession because of the coronavirus outbreak. So far, Trump has handled the crisis abysmally, and significant blame for the US’s delayed response,  including a lack of test kits and any sort of top-down coordination, lies at his feet. This won’t deter his base, who will be getting pumped full of messaging about how Trump has handled the crisis so well. What will be harder to turn a blind eye to is the announcement of a recession, and that recession could deter some of the people who were on the fence about Trump to swing to Biden. That alone might be enough to hand him the popular vote, but not the electoral. 

The frustrating part of doing any kind of political analysis is that at the end of the day it all comes down to location. I don’t just have to predict whether voters will turn out, I have to try to predict where in the country they live and if it’s a swing state, and how likely it will go for one candidate or another. This is just my best shot at trying to predict what will happen.

If my prediction is correct and Joe Biden does win the popular vote and lose the presidency, the Democratic and Republican parties are going to need to have a serious talk about whether or not they actually think the Electoral College is fair. I don’t think anything fruitful or productive will come of those talks, but it is a conversation worth having. If my prediction is correct, it will be the third time in the past six elections that the Democrats had the presidency stolen from them. 

Picking Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee will have disastrous consequences for the party. Biden would be at bare minimum a better president than Trump, but he would not be a good one, and he will not fix the problems that drove millions to vote for Trump in the first place. 

I haven’t even gotten to Bernie Sanders’s supporters yet in my analysis. It is impossible to tell at this stage how many will show up at the polls for Joe Biden. Given the fact that Bernie Sanders could barely get them to go to the polls for him, I doubt Joe Biden will get much of anything in terms of youth turnout, despite his belated attempt to pivot to them now ahead of the general election. A loud minority of Bernie Sanders voters are #NeverBiden, but there is a silent majority of them who will simply show up at the polls for Trump or Biden and don’t feel the need to put the DNC on blast on Twitter to make their point. Bernie’s two greatest weaknesses, in 2016 and 2020, was his vocal minority of crazy supporters and his inability to make friends and alliances. His outsider status drew millions to campaign for him, but it turned the establishment and their followers against him, and ultimately they outnumbered him. 

Historians looking back on this race will probably point to Elizabeth Warren’s claim that Bernie said a woman couldn’t be president in 2020 back in a private conversation in 2018 as the turning point that ultimately incinerated the progressive movement. Prior to that point, Bernie was holding strong in second place, and Elizabeth Warren had dipped to a low 3rd, after her October high point in the polls. In a desperate attempt to gain back her supporters who abandoned her for the perceived “more electable” progressive in the race, she launched a baseless attack against him that he denied. Most egregious of all was CNN’s clear bias towards Warren, as they responded to Sanders’ insistence he did not say what he said by turning to Warren and saying, “So how did you feel when Senator Sanders said that to you?” The clip was widely mocked on social media, but Warren’s embarrassing attempt to play the gender card with her whole “the women on the stage have won more elections than the men on the stage” spiel apparently played well with the faux-woke mainstream media. 

For the record, Bernie Sanders has never stated publicly, ever, that a woman couldn’t be president. A video recently resurfaced from Time of him telling a young girl, in the 1970s, that of course a woman could be president someday. All Elizabeth Warren has as her proof is the word of a few spokespeople for her campaign, in a private meeting in 2018. Instead of confronting Bernie Sanders about it in private at the time, she waited until she was falling in the polls to launch an attack on him. It completely backfired on Warren; all she did was cement Bernie Sanders as the frontrunner of the progressive wing of the party. 

She should have learned from Kamala Harris before her; playing the race and gender card might play well with the pundits, but it does not win over ordinary voters. Once you’ve reduced yourself to saying “vote for me because of my race/gender/other factor completely out of my control” you’ve lost with everyone who’s not plugged into Twitter. You have to give people a reason to vote for you, and not rely on identity politics.  People don’t vote for Biden because of his identity, they vote for him because they believe he is best poised to defeat Donald Trump. People don’t vote for Sanders for his identity, they vote for him because they like his ideas and think he has a shot of getting them done if elected. But because of her attack against Bernie, her refusal to shake his hand after, her accusation that he called her a liar on national TV (he did not), her refusal to drop out of the race until Biden had already consolidated his lead, and her refusal to endorse Sanders when she finally did drop out, all speak volumes to the kind of progressive she really is. If Sanders had dropped out, he would have endorsed her, no question. But she decided she’d rather implicitly back Joe Biden, whom she publicly clashed with at the beginning of her career over fundamental policy differences, than Bernie, at a time when he needed her support more than ever. She owes a huge debt to progressives all over the country, including myself, who thought she’d actually fight for real progressive change. But it was all about getting elected, and when that failed, it was all about making sure she got a spot in Joe Biden’s cabinet. Not altogether surprising, considering she didn’t endorse Bernie in 2016, but very disappointing. 

So with Elizabeth Warren out of the race, you would expect progressives to coalesce around Bernie, but this did not happen, for the reasons listed above. Some Warren supporters went to Biden because a few of Sanders’ vocal supporters sent them snake emojis and that hurt their feelings. (Snake emojis were used by Sanders supporters to call Warren a snake after she called Sanders a sexist.) Others did not go to Bernie because they believed him/his supporters to be sexist due to the media narrative coming out of that debate. Others truly believed Sanders had no chance of winning because he was too far left. But had Elizabeth Warren endorsed Bernie, not only was she likely to have gotten a vice presidency offer, she would have given Sanders a boost at a critical time when the progressive wing needed to coalesce behind one candidate. But the progressive wing was deeply divided over gender politics in a way the moderate lane was not. In the end it was Biden who coalesced support and won big in the Super Tuesday states, not Bernie. 

But this does not mean Biden is a good candidate to take on Trump. He is generally perceived favorably now, but that will change after the Republicans hone their attacks against him. Trump will run circles around him in the debates and it will become even more obvious he is in cognitive decline. The public discourse will be spent poring over every detail of Biden’s long tenure in public service, and not over ways to improve this country’s future. And on top of all that, Biden will not win. Hillary Clinton had a far better shot of winning against Trump in 2016. She had every factor working in her favor. She still lost, though narrowly. Biden does not have those same factors working in his favor now. He will lose, and the media will be shocked that they could have gotten it so wrong, and the people of the world will shrug and say, “I told you he’d get re-elected,” and we’ll be subjected to four more years of whatever it is Trump is doing that cannot possibly be considered a “presidency”.  

I’m obviously disappointed, and I know a lot of other people are too. But I could (obviously) be wrong. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens. 

[3l1n0r]

First post on this blog

Hi everyone:

I started this side blog a while ago but I’m actually going to start using it for writing soon. Probably will be a mix of fanfiction (from a bunch of different fandoms), political thoughts, and stories from my life (to spice things up a bit). 

I hope you enjoy the blog, let me know what you think.