Another great article by Neill Ferguson, on Bloomberg.
“There are nine reasons Trump may still win, but none seems likely.”
Ferguson foresees a Biden win and a return to normalcy. But looking at history this does not necessarily means that the prospects look bright.
Key points:
A return to normalcy: It’s an appealing prospect today, too, amid an ongoing pandemic, in the wake of an unprecedented economic shock, and after four years of political disruption.
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I have been thinking a lot about the election of 1920 in trying to predict that of 2020. Four years ago, chastened and educated by the experience of Brexit, I felt that Trump had at least an even chance of winning the presidency. Recall that in the week before the Nov. 8, 2016, the left-wing Daily Kos website put Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency at nearly 90%. According to The Upshot in the New York Times, the number was 85%. Betfair said 79%. Nate Silver said 65%.
So what do I think now, when even the ultra-cautious Silver puts Joe Biden’s chance of beating Trump at around 80%? Spoiler: I always said the half-life of populism was short.
Donald Trump is a classic populist, who offered disgruntled voters a heady cocktail of protectionism, nativism, easy money, isolationism and anti-elitism. Comparisons with European fascists between the World Wars always struck me as wide of the mark.
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Trump may have the instincts of a caudillo, but this isn’t Venezuela.
The debate would have mattered only if Biden had looked unmistakably senile. He didn’t. Instead, Trump came across as an insufferable bully. Even my ex-cop friends Mike and Gerry — who backed Trump in 2016 and were infallible guides to that year’s politics — felt their man had been too aggressive. And now it turns out that Trump was mocking Biden for wearing a mask, when he himself was probably already infected with Covid-19. (Not just mocking him, but yelling at him indoors from just six feet away. We won’t be sure for roughly a week that Trump didn’t infect Biden.)
Far from being in peril, I would guess, the Constitution is about to do what it was designed to do: Having successfully constrained a demagogic president throughout his term, in the usual ways — courts striking down executive orders, Supreme Court appointees acting independently, midterms handing the House to the Democrats — it is going to allow voters to eject him from the White House and install in his place dear, old Joe Normal.
For any of the “end of the Republic” scenarios to happen, this election needs to be close — close enough for the results in multiple states to be challengeable. But I struggle to see how this could come about.
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Instead, what we’re getting is a relentless stream of negative news flow about Trump, not the least of which is the New York Times expose of how insanely little income tax the guy has been paying. (As my friend Mike told me last week, “I heard a couple of blue-collar workers today, cops and firemen, talking about the Times story about him not paying any taxes … it was the first time I ever heard anything negative about Trump from this base.”)
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The irony is that if a Biden victory is accompanied by a Democratic majority in the Senate, then it could suddenly be the turn of Republicans to cry “Republic is in peril,” as projects such as packing the Supreme Court, getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate, and giving statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico (i.e., packing the Senate) will suddenly seem feasible to the progressives.
But that’s the trouble with voting for normalcy. Remember, Americans did just that — overwhelmingly — a hundred years ago. What they got was the Roaring Twenties, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War II.