I won't be surprised if Trump outflanks Biden on the left by borrowing some Bernie ideas (may be giving them his own names)
- Student debt cancellation
- Medicare for All
He doesn't have to implement after getting re-elected. Just outflanking Biden on these will scramble the race a bit. Just like he outflanked Hillary on trade issues in '16.
And Biden has Trump massively outflanked on compassion. Trump brags about his TV ratings while Biden gives heartfelt concern for those who have lost loved ones. These times are at least as scary as the early days of the Great Depression. Not only has the economy crashed hard, but there is a virus loose that isn't fully understood that is the most lethal in living memory (for all people under 100).
FDR was incredibly popular because he could talk to people and calm them. His fireside chats were one of his most effective tools to keep his voters in his camp.
Biden isn't as eloquent a speaker as FDR, but he has the same ability to express compassion and caring. Listening to Biden people may feel this is still a scary world, but the guy in charge understands it's scary and is doing everything possible to fix the problem.
Trump has no clue how to even fake compassion. It's an alien notion to him. Trump only cares about one person and his entire life is focused on that one person: himself. It's the nature of malignant narcissism.
Trump's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been worse than GW's response to Katrina and there is no sign it's going to improve.
There is a lot of talk in the media today that COVID-19 is peaking or beginning to decline, but we're just at the top of the first drop on the roller coaster. Some people are thinking it will go away now but may be back this fall. There is a good chance we'll see a drop and it will be back next month.
The most common infectious diseases we deal with are cold and flu which both tend to be more transmittable in colder weather. I see no signs that COVID-19 follows this pattern. Two of the hardest hit countries are Spain and Italy which are among the warmer countries in Europe. Two hard hit areas in the US are New Orleans and South Florida. Also warm areas.
The only weapon that has worked thus far to slow this down is social distancing. It's worked on the west coast of the US and it's starting to work in the Northeast, but in large parts of the US people are not social distancing. I have a friend who drives a store delivery truck for Walmart in the SE. He goes to a lot of rural towns around the SE. He's paranoid about social distancing because his mother lives part time with him and she's very high risk. But when he goes to the rural stores people keep touching him and don't keep any kind of distance. In fact they are more in his face than before the pandemic.
In the distant past people would escape to the country during pandemics and it would impact the countryside much less than cities because rural areas had little traffic in the best of times and during a pandemic they could isolate better. The last big pandemic, the 1918 flu epidemic turned that on its head. In the US rural areas were impacted much more than cities. The overall death toll in the US was around 0.6%, but in urban areas it was less than 0.1%. In some rural communities the death toll was 90%.
The 1918 flu is now thought to be a return of an 1890 flu outbreak that did mostly hit cities because rural areas were less traveled to then. In urban areas in 1918 the death toll among those over 30 was much lower than those under. The rural areas that had been spared the 1890 flu had no herd immunity.
In this pandemic, we're all like the rural communities of 1918. We have no herd immunity going in. We also have far more traffic in and out of all rural areas than we had in 1918. 1918 had unusually high rural traffic for the early 20th century because of the war and many rural soldiers going off to fight, then returning. But traffic to rural areas on an average day today is far more than seen in even 1918. Most rural towns have some sort of highway now, some are on interstates. Most rural towns have some sort of big retailer like Walmart with trucks hauling in supplies daily. Those that don't have one in the next town and people need to drive to that town. Get a few asymptomatic cases going in a Walmart and the entire county will get infected.
Trump has also done things that have or will tick off his base. My SO was looking at what sailors in the Navy are saying about Trump and the firing of the captain of the Roosevelt. Quite a few rank and file sailors are saying they have switched their vote and most people they know feel the same.
Trump also wants to kill the post office. It's on shaky ground right now because of the trap law the Republicans passed in 2005 that requires the post office to put money in a fund to pay for health care for postal employees that haven't even been born yet. The downturn in the economy has really hit the post office hard and it might run out of money by June. Trump wants to let it die because he wants to kill vote by mail. However in many rural areas the only service that delivers out there is the post office. If it does, or even looks like its going to die, the most rural of voters will have no shipping service of any kind.
Trump also has a number of well funded enemies he didn't have in 2016. There is the Lincoln Project, Bill Krystol's organization, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer who will all be running ads reminding people of Trump's failures. They have enough money between them to buy up most of the ad time on TV coast to coast in the last month of the election.
Trump won in part in 2016 because he had no record in politics and Hillary had a long history. Trump now has a record and it's full of failures.
