For Biden and Trump, clashing realities
Conventions set stage for sprint to the finish
The Republican and Democratic conventions didn’t present only competing political parties to voters. They also reflected clashing visions of reality in the nation Donald Trump and Joe Biden are battling to lead.
In Trump’s America, the coronavirus is no longer the looming threat: The president accepted the GOP nomination with an address cheered by the sort of big crowd that has been outlawed in the District of Columbia for fears of spreading the disease. In Biden’s America, the virus remains a deadly menace: He accepted the Democratic nomination on a stark stage in his Delaware hometown with only a handful of reporters as his audience.
On this, the two rivals agree: Electing the other guy would be apocalyptic, imperiling the very idea of America.
“At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas,” Trump said in his speech from the South Lawn, a sentence Biden could comfortably have uttered. Trump went on: “This election will decide whether we save the American dream, or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.”
In his acceptance speech, Biden warned that the “American dream feels as if it’s slowly slipping away” by the policies and actions of the incumbent president.
“I don’t need to tell you that,” the for
Susan Page
mer vice president added. “You feel it every single day in your own lives.”
Biden has repeatedly said that a “battle for the soul of the nation” is on the ballot, almost exactly the same words that the Trump campaign used Friday in a fundraising appeal.
The back-to-back conventions weren’t likely to transform the political landscape. Neither candidate was an unfamiliar figure. Trump has been president for nearly four years; Biden was vice president for eight and a longtime U.S. senator before that.
“If you sat through hours of convention programming, you had probably made up your mind a long time ago,” said John Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and co-author of “Defying the Odds: The 2016 Elections and American Politics.”
But the past two weeks did sharpen the differences and spotlight the stakes. Both conventions featured testimonials from citizens who had tragic or uplifting stories, but they projected very different messages about what matters in this election. On the opening night of the Democratic convention, an Arizona woman blamed Trump for her father’s death from COVID-19. On the opening night of the Republican convention, a St. Louis couple said they had pointed guns at peaceful Black Lives Matter marchers outside their home because they feared for their lives.
What follows over the next 66 days will be millions of dollars in ads, four televised debates and a sprint to Election Day.
Biden heads toward the traditional Labor Day start of the general election with a significant lead.
The FiveThirtyEight.com average of national surveys gives him an edge of 9 percentage points over Trump, 51%-42%, though that doesn’t reflect any bounce the president might have gotten from his speech Thursday night. Biden also holds single-digit leads in the most crucial battleground states: 8 points in Michigan, 5.7 points in Pennsylvania, 6.2 points in Wisconsin, 5.5 points in Florida.
The steadiness of the standings for months has been remarkable. That said, the campaign’s final weeks are playing out in a time of turbulence with little precedence in history.
COVID-19 has cost more than 180,000 lives in the United States and counting – a stunning tally that dwarfs the nation’s death tolls from World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. The stock market is hitting records, but the unemployment rate was 10.2% in July as the economy reels from the pandemic’s repercussions. The shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has sparked new protests over police treatment of Blacks. Violence has erupted in the streets of Kenosha and elsewhere.
“While the conventions are trying to paint a picture,” former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu said, “there’s a reality that people are living.”
Trump and Biden view every one of those developments in fundamentally different ways and prescribe fundamentally different responses to them for the next president.
Biden says the nation needs to address systemic racism in policing; Trump vows a lawand-order crackdown. Trump wants to open up schools and commerce to boost the economy, despite the continuing risks of the coronavirus; Biden argues that the economy can’t recover until the virus is firmly under control.
The sharpness of that divide raise this question: In an America that is so polarized, with voters viewing every event through such different lenses, how will either candidate manage to govern when the election is over?