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The November 3, 2020 U.S. presidential election will look more like the presidential election of November 8, 1932, not November 8, 2016.
In 1932 in the U.S. the Great Depression of the late 1920s had affected millions of Americans, ravaging the economy and putting 25 percent of the workforce out of work. Originally called The Republican Great Depression (since the GOP presided over it), the economic downturn didn’t raise any concerns in then-Republican president Herbert Hoover, who took no measures to help people or to arrest the chaotic and devastating crater in American society, health and well-being that the Depression caused.
FDR, who had won the New York governor’s race just four years prior, won the Democratic presidential nomination and ran against an inept, ineffective, indifferent and callous incumbent Hoover. Hoover had sought a second term in office. FDR ran on Hoover’s terrible record and the promise of a New Deal that would rejuvenate the American economy and enliven and invigorate the American people and their spirit.
FDR won the 1932 U.S. presidential election in a landslide.
Herbert Hoover won six states.
The forthcoming presidential election this November 3, even with the massive vote stealing from millions of American voters that Republicans are already doing in numerous states (and the avoidance in some of those states of vote by mail), will result in similar fashion to 1932. The coronavirus pandemic (and Donald Trump’s foolish trade wars with China and two tax cuts for the billionaire class) has brought on a second Republican Great Depression now in the U.S., with miles-long food bank lines across the country and more than 26 million people unemployed in just the last five weeks alone. The job gains of all of Obama’s eight years in office have been completely wiped out in that same five-week time period.
Unemployment will soon be at 30 percent in the United States, easily surpassing the percentage of unemployment during the last Republican Great Depression. Over 54,000 people and counting have died from Covid-19 in the U.S., with the sad numbers approaching the 58,000 killed in Vietnam during the war there. All of these deaths will have occurred over just seven-plus weeks.
Home-building declined in March 2020 by more than 22 percent. Consumer confidence has tanked. And despite dangerous, rash measures by Republican governors like Georgia governor Brian Kemp to re-open businesses (in trades mostly aimed at the working class) people are not flocking back to stores amidst fears that they could catch the virus.
With an indifferent Donald Trump as an incumbent very slow to act, if at all, during this deadly pandemic to help many of the states and their Democratic and Republican governors, and the irresponsible, dangerous statements and the lies he has told, November likely election returns are already spelling out a Trump defeat.
Though Joe Biden has had a bland, less-than-energetic start to his campaign as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, the man that Trump sought to derail in phone calls and correspondence to Ukraine last July, he is slowly beginning to go on the attack, rightly assailing Trump as someone who did nothing during the month of February as this pandemic was raging. Biden has already been endorsed by numerous Republicans, including George Conway, Rick Wilson, George Will and others. Some Trump voters have openly regretted voting for him and said they will vote for Biden this November.
For what it is worth, polls show Biden beating Trump. And Trump, in addition to not claiming responsibility for the deaths of Americans including seniors, is losing that latter key demographic in polls as well for this November. Yet voter registration and turnout will be the key this fall, as will the aforementioned Republican stealing of millions of votes from Americans, early voting and vote-by-mail, especially if the coronavirus is expected to come back with even more force just before the November election. Biden will also have to pick the right running mate to signal to the demographic base he will need to carry him over the line.
Like Hoover, Trump has been indifferent to the mass deaths and suffering of millions of Americans. He has sought to distract the public from his static response to this pandemic (which he knew of from at least November 2019) with daily campaign rallies from the White House briefing room or the Rose Garden, rather than provide useful, important information to the general public, which has already grown weary and exhausted by Trump and his aimless, dishonest daily rallies. Biden has been more aggressive on social media, particularly Twitter, where ads against Trump have been far more hard-hitting than the presumptive nominee himself has.
Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, has behaved more like a president than Trump has, and sounds more like the presumptive Democratic nominee than Biden does.
Quietly, Joe Biden is listening to Progressive Democrats and Bernie Sanders to broaden his own message and appeal to the American public and its left-wing flank. While Biden has faced limited scrutiny surrounding Tara Reade’s rape allegations against him (which will probably have no impact on the election; in their respective elections Trump and Bill Clinton allegations did not), Biden has started making the rounds on local television to various demographics across the country he will need to win. Biden has pointed to an op-ed he wrote in late January warning of the pandemic and making it clear Trump was the worst possible leader to be in charge during it.
So far, Biden has been proven right.
At this point, with the U.S. economy continuing into a second Republican Great Depression and the deaths of people from coronavirus scaling towards 100,000 people (and the numbers are surely much higher due to a lack of testing), the handwriting is on the wall for Trump, whose Hoover-like, but even worse lack of response has been damning.
The election to come may resemble 2016 only in the “lesser of two evils” approach, but because of the trail of destruction the impeached Trump has left and continues to commit and the sheer contrast of Joe Biden as an experienced government official and reasoned voice, if a far-from coherent and clear one, the general public has seen enough of the Trump freak show of death and are heading to Biden to exert their outrage, frustration and anger with a Republican Party that has pledged to a dictator and one-party “minority” rule.
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Top photo: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden
POLITICRAT 