November uncertain as ever
Consumer warning: Before you get locked into a narrative about how the presidential election will unfold, consider what happened the other day in Maine and Alabama.
Neither event was particularly remarkable or surprising. You could see each of them coming from a lobster boat off the Atlantic coastline (now is the traditional height of the crustaceans’ vacation-time consumption) or a shrimper in the Gulf of Mexico (the state’s brown shrimp season opened six weeks ago). But these results tell us something nonetheless.
In Maine, the speaker of the state House, Sara Gideon, won the Democratic primary to have the chance to topple the lawmaker moderates and liberals consider the biggest apostate in American politics. Gideon is by far the strongest challenger to Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican who angered many of her supporters by backing the two Trump Supreme Court nominees and voting to acquit the president in the impeachment trial.
In Alabama, former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville won the Republican primary against Jeff Sessions, the onetime judge, senator and Trump attorney general whom the president considers “mentally retarded” and “mixed up and confused.” Tuberville, who now faces Sen. Doug Jones, perhaps the most endangered Democrat in the Senate, had the support of the president and likely would be among Trump’s most loyal acolytes if he wins the seat in the Capitol.
Now, let us acknowledge these two states — with far different autumn prospects — have about as much in common as Norway and North Korea. Alabama was the site of the first capital of the Confederacy; Maine was the home of Joshua L. Chamberlain, the Union hero of Gettysburg and later the president of Bowdoin College and governor of his native state. Maine has eight cases of coronavirus per 100,000 people; Alabama has three times that many. The University of Alabama beat Michigan in football last year; the University of Maine lost to Towson State. Then again, Maine beat Eastern hockey power Boston College last year, while Alabama-huntsville lost to Bemidji State four times.
Even so, these results about 1,200 miles apart show how difficult it will be to predict anything about the 2020 election. The Maine results provide succor for those who loathe Trump. The Alabama results provide just as encouraging results for those who champion him. But taken together, these results constitute one of the many imponderables about the fall election.
Here are some others: Will Black voters pour into the polls to support former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., or will they repeat their 2016 performance, when they comprised more than a third of the Barack Obama 2012 supporters who didn’t vote four years later? Will suburban voters, particularly women, who sided with Trump in 2016 now vote for Biden? Will a coronavirus upsurge — we don’t know for sure that this will happen — hurt the president or depress the turnout of Trump’s opponents?
Some more: Will the proliferation of mail-in ballots help Biden the way it helped the Democratic congressional candidate Nathan Mcmurray late last month in a district around Buffalo, N.Y., where he received more primary mail-in votes than the Republican primary winner? How much voter fraud will there be? How much fraud will there be in claims of voter fraud?
And here’s one dividing scholars of politics: Will the economy be a Trump asset or a Trump disadvantage?
Team Biden thinks the economy works to Biden’s advantage, and is using another issue — the president’s response to the virus — as a cudgel to argue Trump lacks competence in economic matters. Here’s what top Biden strategist Anita Dunn told me the other day:
“Joe Biden has (an economic) plan — Trump has none. The difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is illustrated in their approach to the pandemic and what we need to do to help families recover from the economic pain caused by Trump’s catastrophic lack of preparedness and leadership during COVID-19. Joe Biden knows you can’t bully a virus to go away, and that controlling the pandemic is the first step to economic recovery. Donald Trump has failed the presidential test of leadership on every measure.”
The angle the Biden campaign is taking: Why trust someone who ruined the economy to fix it? They might smile in irony if they considered this quote from the past: “You wouldn’t trust the man who made the mess to clean it up.” It not only is from Richard Nixon. It’s from his Checkers speech of 1952.