Three election-related events are coming up:
- Joe Biden announces a VP selection (supposedly by Aug. 1st).
- Democratic Party national convention (Aug. 17–20).
- Republican Party national convention (Aug. 24–27).
As a certified non-expert, I’d like to speculate on what these events mean for the trajectory of the race.
To begin with, this is Biden’s time to come out and define himself. He has not been in the news as much as someone leading in the polls by 10 points would be. Part of it is because he was overshadowed by two calamities: thousands of epidemic US deaths and an associated economic black hole; and a tumor-in-chief doggedly laboring to kill the Republic which hosts him.
But I also believe that Biden’s campaign has been purposefully laying low. Biden is fairly well known from his time as VP, and is reasonably well-liked. The campaign up to now has been doing fine by letting the incumbent sink himself.
Picking a VP is a potential president’s first concrete action. Biden can pick someone with a more leftist or a more centrist image, a more activist or a more “background” image. Whoever he happens to pick, for the first time since the winter Biden will be in the news, at least until the next outrage or tweet from the White House pushes him aside again.
The same will be repeated during the Democratic Convention. For once, we are going to have the Democratic platform in the news. We’ll have Bernie Sanders and no doubt other faces from the primaries giving speeches. Very likely Obama, now a beloved elder statesman, will be there to lift people’s spirits up. It will please many, it will displease others, but the Democrats will be in the news.
This month will be the first and the last chance the Republicans will have to get something to stick to Biden. They’ll attack the VP: if Warren, she’s shrill. If Harris, she’s uppity. If anyone, she’s a woman. They’ll try to establish hate among those who might shrug off the VP, and hope that few voters on the fence will be swayed against Biden. When the convention happens, they’ll present it as a communist Antifa tax-lover free-for-all, and if Biden ever mispronounces one syllable, he’ll be forever a senile half-corpse.
Will any of this stick? A little, maybe, but not much. The Democrats have been immunized by weak and ineffective Republican attacks all year. Negative campaigning from a position of weakness makes you look even weaker, and weak is what the American electorate, especially conservatives, despises.
And then the Republican convention will be up. They won’t be able to run on achievements. They’ll run on pretend achievements and on stirring up the ugly. And by the end of August we’ll be where we are now, only with tens of thousands more COVID dead, another month of unpaid rents, and weeks away from the start of early voting in some states.
Here’s what I expect. For me, for us Democrats, for us Progressives, August will be good. We won’t like everything that Biden says, but he’ll come off as someone to like for himself, not just as Not The Other One. Many Independents will feel the same. A few will decide they don’t like him after all.
I expect Biden’s lead to shrink, temporarily, as some conservative never-TPers will struggle to support someone who will be revealed to be, well, a Democrat. But that lead will recover or even increase, when we’re all back to the regularly scheduled shit-show, capped by TP’s closing speech at the Republican convention, ad-libbing grievances and angrily clawing back the attention given to others for a few days the week before. By early September, the race will be baked in.
That’s my prognostication. What do y’all think?