re: #182 lawhawk

It’s weird.

Had Trump done a halfway competent job of handling the pandemic, he would have won reelection handily. His disastrous handling of the pandemic, the body count, and the wrecked economy all ran against him.

Even then, a handful of states had close calls in Biden’s favor - again because of the pandemic and turnout favoring Democrats.

GOP intend to make that more difficult by suppressing turnout. They don’t want people voting, because when they do, they aren’t voting for the GOPers.

The other thing is that the GOP and right wing exist in a media bubble. It’s a pocket universe where down is up, right is wrong, and morality is irrelevant - power is the sole motivating thing and imposing pain and cruelty on their enemies is their way of reminding people of their place. When all these people hear and see are Trump rallies with 1000s of people, they think he’s got the support that it takes to win.

And polling is showing itself to be as sketchy as always. GOPers have also called into question the very act of voting and tabulating those votes because they know how timing of those counted votes matter. We can get in-person voting tabulated quickly, but mail ballots take longer, and more people voted by mail in 2020 than at any point in our history. So, early counts went GOP because they voted in person to a greater degree in key states, but the mail in ballots overwhelmed that early advantage.

GOP pollsters and leaders knew this, but sought to cast the mail ballots as somehow illegitimate. So, they were fine potentially disenfranchising millions in the process.

today’s electoral-vote.com

This is the ultimate irony, because Trump did help create Operation Warp Speed to fund quick development of a vaccine for COVID-19 and it succeeded. If he had campaigned on the theme: “Due to my brilliant leadership, we now have a vaccine that can protect everyone from this awful disease” he might well have been reelected. Getting the Trump Vaccine™ could have been a part of Republican dogma, but Trump got on the vaccine bandwagon much too late (even though he was personally vaccinated early on) so his supporters never jumped on and refuse to do so now.