Tulsa rally means nothing
What is the significance of the in-person attendance at a June rally for President Donald Trump in Tulsa, Okla., to the election result on Nov. 3?
Zero. Nothing. Nada. Only those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome will argue otherwise. But they did. All Sunday long on MSNBC, CNN and Twitter—where the blue bubble is thickest and reality is what the inhabitants want it to be. There has never been a Truman Show quite as complete as America’s left wing talking to itself in 2020.
The president no doubt would have preferred to begin the summer campaigning with a bang and a packed arena in Tulsa. But only 6,000 people braved covid-19 concerns and perhaps the fear of violent protests.
Neither the protesters nor the supporters showed up in great numbers, however, and the crowd, though bigger by far than any former vice president Joe Biden has drawn since the virus exploded in the United States, did not live up to the enormous expectations that the president’s campaign team had been predicting. Apparently “under-promise, over-deliver” hasn’t been drilled into Team Trump yet.
That 4 million people reportedly watched the rally online and more on television matters, as does the fact that the president was on message, funny and entertaining (though a bit rusty on his delivery). This compensated for some of the letdown among Trump supporters over the not-packed house. Still, reality is relentless. The rallies of 2020 are not going to be the same as the rallies of 2016. Because … the virus.
Unless, that is, the rallies stay outside—in small college or high school stadiums that people can enter through many gates, or on tarmac where Air Force One sits in the background.
All day Sunday, the blue bubble fixated on the president’s alleged disappointment. (Trump has said nothing on the record, but nobody likes empty seats when they have been promised an overflow crowd.)
There was a frenzy of so-called dunking on the president and his campaign team. A peculiar evolution of talking-head cable news in the Trump era is that almost everyone tries to speak to either the president (a widespread conceit) or their Twitter followers (a real effect and not a good one) through the sound bites they are allotted, and not to average viewers.
It isn’t about the “news” anymore. The cable shows are infotainment for the already decided and will have zero impact on the electorate.
Why? Because the 10 percent to 20 percent of Americans who haven’t already decided whether to vote to re-elect Trump do not watch cable. The cable-news audience on an average night is around 7 million. Nearly 130 million Americans voted in the 2016 election. See the gap? Cable news is not the political landscape. Nor are national polls. Tell me what is happening in Pennsylvania, and I’ll give you my guess who will win in 2020. Right now, it’s nearly a statistical dead heat.
Come the fall, the choice for president will be a stark one. The Trump pitch is “the Constitution, economic recovery, military spending and the national security which accompanies it, and another 300 judges.” Trump will assert that a vote for Biden is a vote for a vastly increased bureaucratic approach to governance, hard-left appointees in every agency, and appeasement abroad—beginning with the People’s Republic of China.
Biden will argue for a return to normalcy and will promise to end the polarization. Both men will have trouble persuading the middle of the country’s electorate which case is stronger. But however the election turns out, it will have nothing to do with Saturday night’s rally in Oklahoma.