Labor Day Random observations on the state of the election as summer ends:
It's pretty clear what Trump is up to. With his constant badmouthing of mail-in voting and interference with the post office, he hopes to skew the election his way. His nonstop, baseless claims that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud is a signal to his zombie base to vote in person and risk their lives due to COVID. It seems to be working. Polls show only about 30 percent of Republicans plan to vote by mail. Meanwhile approximately 70 percent Democrats plan to use absentee or mail-in voting. Trumpy's plan is have the lead on election night via in-person voting, then Biden will surge ahead in the days that follow as the mail vote is counted (some states allow up to three weeks for mailed-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked on election day.) He'll claim victory on election night and say the subsequent votes are illegal. He'll go to court and drag this thing out as long as possible, casting doubt on the results. I hope I'm wrong, but 2020 will make 2000 look like a model of order and decorum. If it goes to the Supreme Court as in Bush-Gore, I think Roberts will want to protect his legacy and vote for Biden if the votes breaks that way.
Polls show Biden is maintaining his national lead despite Trumpy's attempts to recast the election as a choice between his law and order message and chaos. Actually, it should be chaos (what we have now) versus worse chaos (what he says will happen is Biden is prez). Many pundits have pointed out that the racial unrest and violent protests are under Trump's watch so the strategy won't work. What they are missing is Trump's base who believe anything he says, and more importantly, squishy moderates, will buy the notion that Biden wants to defund the police (despite the Dem nominee's statements to the contrary). These Trump true believers and spineless middle-dwellers may actually believe the gun-wielding couple from St, Louis that things may be bad now and Trump may be an awful person, but he is the only thing standing between them and a dystopian horror film of black and brown hordes enacting a 21st-century edition of the French Revolution. Never mind that a recent study shows that 93 percent of Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful. Never mind that the root causes of the protests (police brutality against black and brown people) are not being addressed and will continue if they are ignored. Never mind that Trump calls all the BLM protesters thugs and anarchists while white supremacists and that teenager in Kenosha who shot three protestors, killing two of them, are very fine people. So the analogy of Trump running Nixon's 1968 playbook doesn't quite work. Yes, he's the incumbent but he's saying vote for me even if you hate me or things will be even worse under the other guy.
Rather than bringing in new people and trying to unite us, Trump is concentrating on swaying jello-like voters in only three swing states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan). He knows he can't win the popular vote, so he's targeting a niche of America which is so cynical and awful. My vote as a New Yorker should be just as important as any in a swing state. I hate the electoral college. It's given us Dubya and Trump.
Trump's base will swallow whatever crap he hands them. He's conditioned them not to believe any negative press about him so they don't believe the Atlantic story about disparaging the military. (Note even Fox News has verified the reporting.)
On a final, ironic note: Did you read about the pro-Trump boat parade in Texas where four boats sank? It's a perfect metaphor for the Trumpsters. There were too many boats and when they all starting moving too fast, creating big waves which overwhelmed some of the craft. Just like anti-maskers at the Tulsa Trump rally, they didn't obey the rules, ignored sciences and wound up underwater.
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