10-29-2020, 05:40 AM
(10-28-2020, 04:25 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: What To Make Of That New Wisconsin Poll That Has Biden Way Ahead
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wha...way-ahead/
That lead is a gigantic outlier, consistent with about a 57-40 win by Biden in Wisconsin. Oddly the same pollster showed Biden up "only" 7% (which itself would be lethal to any chance of a Trump win of Michigan, and when other pollsters had margins of 8%, 9%, and 10% for Biden in Michigan. I could imagine the states switched, with unusually high turnout for Democrats in Michigan. Trump badly mangled the response to the nefarious plot against Governor Whitmer.
All of a sudden I see a 4% lead for Joe Biden in Iowa, something that I had never seen (the Hawkeye State had typically shown that Trump's 9% win in Iowa in 2016 was no fluke).
To put it tamely, we are going to see some strange things on Tuesday night. We are accustomed to close elections and to incumbent Presidents getting re-elected. But this is a Crisis Era, and attitudes can change swiftly. I see a new political consensus forming, but I can't quite define it. One obvious difference is that the leader that we now have is about as far from the leaders of the Continental Congress, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt as is possible in competence and integrity. Obama may have been more the sort of leader that America tends to get after a Crisis is over, more like Grover Cleveland or Dwight Eisenhower... someone more likely to negotiate than to read the Riot Act toward opponents. Trump is swift to read the Riot Act, so to speak, especially when the opponents are anything but rioters.
I see America tiring of confrontation. This election is not the end of the Republican Party; when Joe Biden is getting much support in the election from people who have typically voted for conservative Republicans one knows that he at best can hope for a shaky alliance soon after he is inaugurated. This said, Americans seem to want placid politics and not apocalyptic speeches. We have had our experience with the Hard Right getting power and sticking it to everyone else instead of efforts to find workable compromises.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.