Trump hasn't won yet
The last time an unpopular incumbent held on, he was also behind in the polls in the summer
There are lots of reasons to believe that Trump might win the presidential election in November. For several months, high quality polls in battleground states, such as the New York Times’s surveys, have shown that the former guy is ahead in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Michigan. If Trump wins these states there is no realistic prospect of Joe Biden remaining in the White House. On 12 June The Economist put out its election forecast showing the Trump was more likely to win than Biden. Hardly surprising given the polling in the key swing states. Fivethirtyeight, another prediction and polling site, has them at toss-up. Given the terrible risks associated with a Trump presidency, is it time to abandon hope?
In 2004, the last time an unpopular incumbent ran for a second term, there were lots of reasons to believe that George W Bush would not be re-elected. The country was going through a cost of living crisis associated with high gas prices and a costly foreign war. There was considerable polarisation in politics and an increasingly militant right-wing was seeking to embed its grip on power by packing the Supreme Court with hard-right activist judges, egged on by Fox News and a wider ecosystem of right-wing media. In July and August, as well as earlier in the campaign, Democratic challenger John Kerry had a clear lead in the polls.
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As everyone knows, Bush went on to win the presidency, the last time Republicans also won the popular vote in a presidential election. With the more recent example of Trump as an extreme comparison there’s a tendency to look back at George W Bush as a ‘decent’ man, conservative but not criminal, political but not insurrectionary. I don’t subscribe to this view: he came to power because of a stolen election handed to him by a Supreme Court packed by his Republican predecessors. He started a devastating illegal war on a cynical premise he knew to be false whose aftershocks persist to this day, leading to deaths in the hundreds of thousands and destabilising an entire region. He appointed judges to the Supreme Court that include Samuel Alito who has shown himself to be corrupt, tendentious and entirely unsuited to the job. And he paved the way for the politics of Trump by engaging in culture wars and stoking community tensions whilst depending on the votes of religious extremists. Bush was a necessary prelude to Trump.
Probably because of the Barack Obama phenomenon, John Kerry’s 2004 campaign has often been looked on as a hopeless exercise, a gawky WASP with few political skills with little chance of victory. Given that he was one state away from winning and it led to one of the narrowest electoral college counts in recent history, this doesn’t seem to be an accurate framing. For the Democrats to lose required a post-truth political campaign of the sort that Trumpians would approve of, in which John Kerry, a decorated war hero, was accused of a lack of patriotism and military valour, whereas Bush, who had used his family connections to avoid being sent to Vietnam, came out as a patriot. Kerry’s subsequent career as Secretary of State and climate negotiator has gone some way to rehabilitating this impressive American public servant.
Obviously there are differences with this campaign - most notably that the populist right are not the incumbents and also with the age of both candidates. The polls from 2004 tell a story that it is not in any way impossible for an incumbent president with a difficult international backdrop to turn things around. And in Biden’s favour is the fact that Trump appears to be increasingly detached from reality. Anybody witnessing his recent campaign speech on sharks and batteries will have been baffled and concerned in equal measure. Biden stutters and sometimes gets names and dates wrong. He is too old for this job. But Trump appears to have lost it altogether. These differences may come out as the campaign becomes more intense closer to polling day.
However, none of this is written from any sense of complacency or confidence. That we are only a few months away from a possible second Trump presidency is a terrible thing and one that would have profound global effects were it to happen. But the polls now might not be a good indicator of who will win in November.
Let's keep our fingers crossed. Looking at the polls results in 2004 Kerry was constantly ahead until the end of August. August was the months when the campaign of swift-boating Kerry came into full swing. It went downhill from then.
I doubt there will be any possibility to hurt the convicted felon with any revelations – true or false – concerning his character, policies, whatever. He is a mobster, a psychopath, a rapist, a philanderer, a serial liar (sorry, a proponent of alternative facts), a misoginist, an insurrectionist, an autocrat with the declared intention to end democracy in the US.
And this guy has a decent chance to return to the White House (ok, admittedly with the help of the undemocratic electoral system)! Given the obvious mental state of a large segment of the electorate the only possibility seems to be a 'smear campaign', where Democrats depict the candidate as an actually decent, sane and sensible guy, working tirelessly for the good of the American people and upholding democratic values.
THAT might hurt him with the deplorables. But who would believe them?
Yes, the media and political establishment have forgotten how extreme GWB was compared to previous Republicans (like his Dad)