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NDN News: Three Weeks To Go – Where Things Stand

Biden Surging, Trump Playing the Fool - With Trump unable to get out of the low 40s this year there was always a chance the Presidential race would blow open at the end. If he’s at 43% today that means 57% has looked at him and isn’t with him. He’s in the high 30s and low 40s on most issues, including his management of COVID, health care, the protests and the nomination of Coney Barrett. For some time the big question in this race has been - could Trump get his numbers up and make the race competitive? The answer we are learning is no – and this means for all the gains Biden has made in recent weeks there could be even more vote out there for him in the home stretch. A few important national polls have had the margin at 12-16 points in recent days. +14 is 57-43, which means all of the outstanding undecided vote breaks to the challenger, something that happens all the time in competitive races; and given Trump’s truly awful endgame performance is certainly possible in this election.

Over the past two weeks Biden’s lead in 538’s national tracker has gone from +7 to +10.5, (52.4-41.9). He is over 50 now in 279 Electoral College votes – PA, MI, MN, NE2, NH, NV, PA, WI. Trump is not definitely ahead in a single battleground state, and is, incredibly off the air in IA and OH where Biden is even (Trump is visiting IA this week – holy amazeballs). Democrats have a huge financial advantage, early voting is shattering records, Biden may outperform Obama 2008 with young voters, polls found both Biden and Harris outperforming their opponents in the debates, and Trump spitefully pulled out of this week’s debate forgoing a critical tool for him to try to turn things around (holy amazeballs again).

We also just acknowledge how sure footed and capable the Biden campaign has been. Despite extraordinary circumstances, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon and her team have done an incredible job.

Democrats Should Win the Senate– Democrats appear poised to take back the Senate this November. Polling suggests that AZ, CO and ME are likely to go Democratic, while Democrats retain steady leads in IA and NC. It has to be noted that like Trump Ernst in IA and Tillis in NC just can’t seem to get out of the low 40s, and incumbents that disliked seldom win. The risk for the Rs now is that if 2020 is turning into a wave election, it is likely they will lose some of these other races which are now tossups – AK, GA (2), KS, MT, SC. As of today I think it is more likely Democrats get to 53-54-55 then Rs keep the Senate.

The Regime is Collapsing– Whatever it is they thought they were doing, Trump and the Republicans are ending the election in perhaps the worst possible manner, closing with daily reminders of their failure to manage COVID, how extremists have overtaken their party, and just how much they’ve come to hold our democracy in contempt. After a year of piously arguing that it would be improper to move a SCOTUS pick in an election year, the GOP have moved both Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett in the weeks just before these last two elections. The spectacle of the Coney Barrett process – the superspreader event at the White House, her repeated flouting of CDC guidelines, the maskless COVID positive Senator Lee addressing the hearing yesterday, the refusal of Senators to establish a process of testing and ways of keeping everyone safe – it just feels like something has broken inside the Republican Party, madness has overtaken them, and our democracy is being soiled and weakened each day this goes on.

As I wrote in a recent Letras Libres magazine essay, it is time the political class in America to come to terms with the fact that one of its two political parties has failed. As we talk about in our “With Democrats” presentation, we think the main cause of the GOP’s struggles has been a failure to adapt to new realities which emerged after the end of the Cold War – globalization, changing electorate here in the US, climate change etc. Rather than evolving and modernizing, the GOP became a reactionary force, even justifying deeply illiberal, anti-democratic efforts to attempt to stay in power. What we’ve seen this year – suppressing of witnesses and documents in the Senate Impeachment trial, sabotaging of the postal service, the wrecking of the census, 5 hour lines and a single ballot drop box for big American cities, the hysterical cries of voter fraud, Bill Barr – would shock the Founding Fathers, as they are inconsistent with any version of a democracy which sprung from this soil over 200 years ago.

But the GOP and Federalist Society campaign to steal judicial seats and court pack over the past few years may be the most significant trampling of recent democratic norms, as it will be long lasting, and something which may require extraordinary remedies. Locking in a reactionary political movement through lifetime appointments to the courts as the country moves on is a recipe for sustained political and potentially de-stabilizing conflict. The manner in which McConnell packed the courts was fundamentally illegitimate and illiberal; for a majority of the country the exercise of power by a force both illegitimate and reactionary is antithetical to our system of governance, and will be unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of Americans who adhere to a very different world view.

Simply, minorities don’t rule in a democracy. If they do, it is no longer a democracy as we understand them. That my friends is the rub, and something that a political party on the verge of having won the popular vote in 7 out of 8 national elections has every right to do something about in the coming years.

- Simon Rosenberg, Oct 13, 2020

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