We rethink the week with Dean Spiliotis, Civic Scholar and Presidential Scholar at Southern New Hampshire University. He blogs at NHPolitics.com; Stephen Pimpare, Professor at the University of New Hampshire and a nationally recognized expert on poverty, homelessness, and U.S. social policy; and Paul Peter Jesep, attorney and former Republican commentator.
Pres. Trump just held a rally in New Hampshire, where many attendees refused to wear masks or to comply with social distancing rules. When the organizers announced that NH’s Republican Gov. Chris Sununu had mandated those rules in order to protect public safety, the crowd erupted in loud booing. Sununu himself, di not even attend Trump’s rally, although Sununu had supported many Trump policies and took similar positions on the NH equivalents of those policies. We do not, of course, think Sununu’s absence was based on any degree of courage or principles; rather, chalk it up to Sununu’s finely tuned political instincts.
We try (without success) to understand how 90% of Republicans still support Trump, after all his hateful, racist, misogynistic rhetoric and his harmful and dangerous actions? For some reason, the president received a small bump in the polls after his autocratic and health-compromising convention. We must await further polling – and the development of the campaign – to see if the country is really willing to embrace Trump for another four years.
We discuss the different strategies that the two political parties have adopted in trying to win elections. Republicans run toward their base, throw them red meat, whip them up, energize and mobilize them. Democrats, on the other hand, seem always to be looking for ways to expand their base, to be more inclusive and diverse, to piece together as large a coalition as possible. This year, Biden’s centrist ticket has even brought in Republicans (at the same time that his team has tried to appeal to the progressive democrats who opposed him during the primaries.) Biden knows he won’t have to offer a lot of substantive concessions to the progressives because, more than anything else, they can’t wait to get Trump out of the White House.
During the Republican convention and after, Trump has tried to paint Biden as an extremist, sounding more and more like Sen. Joe McCarthy during the 1950s red-baiting travesty. Trump has had a hard time getting traction on his portrayal of Biden, so now he has switched to painting Biden as a puppet of extremists, a presidential candidate in name only, who Trump claims is just a front for AOC, the squad, and Bernie Sanders’ “radical fringe” supporters.
We hope that the Trump campaign won’t succeed with the “puppet” version of its alternative reality. We are, however, concerned that Trump may actually succeed in his growing efforts to scare the public – especially suburban women – into believing that a race riots, violence, and out-of-control chaos will seep into everybody’s peaceful homes and disrupt our happy lives. Like Richard Nixon in 1968, Trump hopes a law and order campaign will seem appealing to the voters whom he frightens. Of course, Trump’s narrative is a false one. He is simply trying to distract voters, to redirect the conversation away from the truly imminent dangers facing our country: COVID-19 and the tanking US economy. Maybe if the president pretends these problems don’t exist, voters might forget about them.
We agree that Biden would be wise to continue focusing on these horrors, and constantly remind voters that this pandemic is a disaster – and it didn’t have to be this way. “You’re trapped in your home. Your kids can’t go to school. It has destroyed our economy, our health, our education, our jobs, our lives.” And all of these thing that are ruining our lives are caused by Donald Trump’s failure to fight the pandemic. (And Trump’s convention did not even mention the pandemic or how it’s hurting the American people. Trump is disconnected from real people’s lives.)
This election will be about mobilizing voters. We’ll see in November which candidate’s strategy worked best.
