During the
2016 and 2020 elections, there have been hundreds of national polls taken on
Trump vs. everybody---Abrams, Bennet, Bloomberg, Booker, Bullock, Buttigieg,
Castro, Clinton, Cuomo, De Blasio, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris,
Hickenlooper, Inslee, Klobuchar, Messen, O’Rourke, Patrick, Ryan, Sanders,
Sestak, Steyer, Warren, Williamson, Young.
And that’s just the Democrats.
Trump
didn’t always win these polls, of course.
He is losing national polls to Biden now, but he has beaten Biden as
well. Hillary certainly won a lot of national
polls against him, though Trump had some wins against her too.
But
there is one character Trump has never been able to beat. Donald is probably 0 - 22, or something. Just in this cycle, there was an October 3,
2019 poll by the PPP organization which had Trump losing 52 – 41. Then there were three major polls in March,
2020. First, on March 3, NBC/WSJ had
Trump losing 48 – 41. Two days later,
Hill/Harris reported a 46 – 39 margin.
Then on March 7, the POLITICO Morning Consult had Trump losing 44 – 36
to this seemingly invincible foe.
OK. Enough.
Who is it that Trump has never beaten?
It’s the “Generic Democrat.”
Pollsters run these polls when everybody knows who one of the candidates
is but the other candidate is undecided.
In early 2012, for example, before Romney won the nomination, there were
polls of Barack Obama vs. “Generic Republican.”
The
reason Trump loses these contests is not hard to figure out. A lot of people don’t like him, though that
is not as big a problem as it may seem at first glance. Many people who didn’t like him actually voted
for him in 2016 because they viewed the alternative, Hillary, as being even
more loathsome than he is. It is a lot
easier to run against a real opponent than against a fantasy because a real
opponent is going to have flaws. There
are lots of actual Democrats Trump
can beat.
A “Generic
Democrat,” however, is pretty much whoever the voter wants it to
be. Combine the sweeping vision of FDR
with the aristocratic polish and loveable family of JFK, the piety of Jimmy
Carter, the feel-your-pain empathy of Bill Clinton…. Well, now you’re talking. Leave Hillary out of the picture
entirely. LBJ as well. A “Generic Democrat” is a pretty attractive
candidate. Every Democrat would vote for
him. I might vote for him myself.
And
that’s who the Democrats, through a bizarre concatenation of circumstances, are
nominating to run against Trump.
Somehow, they have managed to create a “Generic Democrat” and get him on
the ballot.
The one
thing we all know about Joe Biden is that, should he be elected, he will NOT be
president. He’s just not capable of it. He may be able to have an important-looking
state dinner with Angela Merkel and he might ceremonially sign his name to an executive
order somebody else writes, or place a Medal of Honor around a soldier’s neck,
but he will never be permitted to formulate a foreign policy or craft
legislation or send troops into combat or make a deal with Putin. And everybody knows it.
Every
nation has a “head of state” and a “head of government.” In the UK, for example, the Queen is the head
of state and the PM is the head of government, and this division of the
ceremonial and the political is common around the world. In the United States, however, the two are
combined in a single person called the President. At least, that is the way it has been up
until now. If Biden is elected, that
will change. He will be the head of
state and some as-yet-unnamed person or committee will govern.
The
genius of the Democratic strategy here is we are not being told who will be the
actual president, the political leader.
It may be the vice president, whoever that turns out to be, though that
seems increasingly unlikely. Since Joe
remains tucked away in his Bat Cave, we know very little of his campaign and
who is running the show. What we see is his wife, and a group of anonymous
campaign staffers, and a steady stream of politicians from every corner of the
leftish spectrum. He’s been endorsed by
Jimmy Buffett, Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson, Billy Jean King, Megan Rapinoe, Mark
Cuban and dozens of others. Then there’s
the “Biden-Sanders Task Force” that is meeting to draft the party
platform. Bernie loves Joe now. Everybody loves Joe, now that we know he will
never be the real president.
The
American public is thus being permitted to believe whatever it wishes about who
the next president will be. Some
combination of Pelosi and Schumer and Hillary?
Maybe. A committee of Bernie and
Jill Biden and their love child? Well,
that’s possible too. Stacie Abrams? Why not?
The only thing we do know is that if Biden is elected, the next
president WILL NOT be Trump, and for most Democrats, that’s all they need in
order to vote for Joe.
It’s a brilliant
strategy in its way, and very much a “when-life-gives-you-lemons” solution to
array of political problems that would normally doom a campaign:
1) An epidemic
that prevents much traditional campaigning,
2) A candidate about
whom no one has ever been very enthusiastic,
3) A candidate
who will not be able to govern if elected,
4) A candidate
with little in the way of a discernable political philosophy.
Running
“Generic Democrat” for president has never been tried before, but we’ve never
been in this situation before. And it
might work.
Copyright2020MichaelKubacki
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