Democratic politics for the last 20 years,” says John
Anzalone, his lead campaign pollster.
For all the tortured explanations of 2016 and
its aftermath, the political history of this era may
be simple: most Americans didn’t want Trump
to be President in the first place. A confuence
of circumstances—the right opponent, Russian
interference, James Comey’s letter, the Electoral
College—put him in the White House. Trump was
not a political theorist and applied no particular
focus to movement-building beyond the roar of the
crowd, the fattering of his ego. The millions who
loved him gave him a feedback loop of affirmation
and turned swaths of white rural America into
Trump Country.
But the majority of Americans—particularly the
half of the electorate who live in suburban areas—
have taken to the polls over and over again since
to express their displeasure, from local elec-
tions to the 2018 midterms. And Trump
has done little to persuade them to change
their minds. “Trump’s base is charged up.
Energizing them isn’t the issue,” says Larry
Jacobs, a political scientist at the Univer-
sity of Minnesota. The rural white vot-
ers he’s brought into the GOP fold, Jacobs
says, are vastly outnumbered by the urban
and suburban voters he’s driven to the
Democrats, with the result that he’s likely
to do worse in Minnesota than he did four
years ago despite making it a top cam-
paign target. “This is one of those years
that the President is so unpopular, a refer-
endum on him could be a wave all the way
down the ballot.”
The Trump rally in Bemidji is America’s
zillionth but this area’s first. Supporters
cram into the small airport hangar to hear
the President say that Democrats want to fill
their state with third-world refugees like the liberal
Minneapolis Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. He spends
an extended digression praising the military skill of
General Robert E. Lee, goes on for several minutes
about Hillary Clinton’s emails and gleefully describes
the “beautiful” sight of a reporter being hit with a
projectile on live television. Later, health authorities
will report that the rally in Bemidji was the source of
nine COVID-19 cases, two requiring hospitalization.
with a steady lead down the homestretch, the
Biden campaign is focused on avoiding mistakes. “If
we learned anything from 2016, it’s that we cannot
underestimate Donald Trump or his ability to claw his
way back into contention in the final days,” Biden’s
campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, wrote
in an Oct. 17 memo to supporters. The front runner’s
team, working from their houses and apartments and
team-building over Zoom and Slack, is on high alert
against complacency. “If you’re a Biden supporter,
there’s no reason you should be feeling this bad,” says
one Democratic consultant close to the Biden team
who blames “2016 PTSD.”
In national polls, Biden is viewed far more fa-
vorably than Clinton was, has a larger national
lead and does not face a substantial third-party
vote that could erode his standing. State polls
show the Democrat in a more comfortable posi-
tion than Clinton ever truly enjoyed in Wiscon-
sin and Michigan, though other key states, such as
Florida and Pennsylvania, remain tight. A massive
fund raising advantage has allowed Biden’s team to
outspend Trump on television by almost a quarter-
billion dollars in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
North Carolina, Wisconsin and Arizona, and he has
the airwaves almost to himself in Ohio and Iowa.
Democrats also have a clear edge over Republicans
when it comes to early ballot returns. Biden has
opted to campaign lightly, content to keep voters
focused on the incumbent.
If all goes as planned, Biden will look like a politi-
cal genius for executing the most basic stratagems:
run toward the middle, avoid distractions, let your
opponent self-destruct. But then what? “Donald
Trump is mortally afraid of being seen as a loser,”
says Miles Taylor, a former Trump Administration
appointee who’s now campaigning for Biden. “He’ll
cast any loss as illegitimate to make himself feel bet-
ter. And the enormous detriment will not be to Don-
ald Trump—it will be to the country and our demo-
cratic institutions.”
Should he win, Biden will face a set of thorny
challenges beyond the pandemic and attendant re-
cession. His unwieldy coalition includes centrists
and socialists, apostate Republicans and rank-and-
file Democrats, COVID-nervous seniors and angry
young voters of color. He has laid out an ambitious
economic agenda that promises to “build back bet-
ter,” spending trillions to expand health care, build
new infrastructure and address climate change.
Some liberal activists have turned their attention
to pushing for procedural changes such as elimi-
nating the Senate filibuster and adding seats to the
Supreme Court, without which they say his agenda
will be blocked; others argue this would represent an
unacceptable escalation of Trump’s norm breaking.
“Our system has suffered greatly from the
irregular order of Donald Trump, but Joe Biden
knows how to get us back to normal,” says Taylor.
If there’s anything Trump’s election should have
taught us, though, it’s that normal was always an
illusion. America was always a weirder, angrier,
more divided place than its politicians ever seemed
to recognize. There is no going back; the only way
out is through. —With reporting by Charlotte
alter, Brian Bennett, leslie DiCkstein, PhiliP
elliott, simmone shah and aBBy Vesoulis •