Biden’s hidden advantage
It’s already well-established that many Republicans in Congress, possibly most, secretly hate Donald Trump, but go along with his insanity because they live in stark, craven terror of both his stupid, ignorant mouth and his psychotic fanbase. But could that attitude also extend to some significant portion of the general voting population?
It’s an intriguing question. How many Republican voters plan to secretly vote for Biden, or at the very least, vote against whichever MAGA candidate the RNC anoints? I honestly don’t know, but given the size of the Republican constituency, it’s a statistical certainty that the number must be nonzero, and possibly substantial.
I have personal experience with this. I learned years after the fact that, in 1960, my mother voted for John F Kennedy. She did so very much outside the knowledge or approval of my father. I don’t remember this one specific incident, but my older sister does. My mother enlisted me at four and my sister at eight in displaying “Kennedy for President” signs on our front lawn to passing motorists on Election Day. It was my first and only act of political activism of the 20th century.
But, you might reasonably argue, if there potentially are closeted Republicans voting for Biden (or against MAGA), how do we know that they aren’t perfectly balanced by an equivalent number of closeted Democrats voting for MAGA? That is, how do we know whether or not the sanity giveth but the insanity taketh away?
I hope the answer is obvious. Death threats, stochastic tyranny and violent intolerance are MAGA phenomena. No rational person lives in terror of reprisals from President Biden or his supporters. There are no crazed Democrats beheading MAGA fathers on YouTube. There is no Democratic equivalent to January 6.
All of which is to say, we might be in better shape than we think. But there’s even more to our good fortune than that. Whether or not Donald Trump’s candidacy survives to November 5th, he has lost the momentum and novelty he enjoyed in 2016. This time around he is old news, and that news is decidedly bad. His base must, by force of logic, be less potent today than it was in 2016. And Trump doesn’t enjoy the advantage of incumbency he had in 2020. The trend for Trump is ever downward, and his pending criminal trials will ensure the continuation of that downward trend.
The net effect should be that, whether Trump is the Republican candidate or not, the Republican Party will be fatally split by 5 November. Conversely, there is no serious candidate to split the Democrats this time. Who hears anything serious from that sociopathic mallothead Marianne Williamson anymore? I rest my case.
In both 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders represented a liability for the Democratic candidate. Despite this we won the popular vote in both years, and we won the election outright in 2020. Come November we should be stronger than we were in both years. My confidence in a Biden win is therefore very high.
Even so, the stakes are also high. Terrifyingly so. American democracy is at stake. So this is no time for complacency. We can take comfort from our advantageous position, but we still have our work cut out for us. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.