The latest polls show that former Vice President Joe Biden is leading President Donald Trump by a five-point margin nationwide, according to CNN and the research firm SSRS, while Trump has a seven-point lead in battleground states. As we know, battleground states have historically been significant in ultimately choosing the winner in our electoral college system.
The 2020 election, which takes place Nov. 3, could be shaping up as another situation in which the Democratic Party candidate wins the popular vote but fails to garner enough electoral votes. In other words, we could be gearing up for another tight race.
This is stunning to me because Trump has spent four straight years brazenly lying to the public, issuing embellishments and half-truths and just generally talking out of his ass — almost all of it documented and written about repeatedly in the press — as well as insulting nearly every voting demographic in the country and being openly hostile to our democratic institutions. Yet, he seems to have carte blanche free reign to do as he pleases inside the Republican Party, which is full of cowards who refuse to stand up to him, and his supporters in the public sphere either don’t care about his unethical behavior or give him a pass because they like his politics.
Trump bullies and insults anyone who dares disagree or question him. He has shown many instances of narcissistic tendencies and crude behavior toward women. He’s flirted with open racists. He and/or his inner cycle most certainly colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. He has shown little to no empathy during the coronavirus pandemic. He unabashedly refuses to wear a mask and set an example for the rest of the country. In one of the many talking-out-of-his-ass episodes, he raised the question about whether people could potentially inject disinfectant as a potential cure for the virus. And lo and behold, some small percentage of the population took him seriously. Of course, as he has done in the past, Trump covers his tracks on this idiotic idea by claiming that he was being “sarcastic.” I watched the press conference, and it sounded as if it was a fairly serious suggestion.
In any case, one can only imagine why millions still support him, but something close to half of the people who have been polled are still on the Trump train despite everything that I have mentioned.
Do they support him because he has made good on his campaign promises? A quick check at politifact.com will reveal that, of Trump’s five major campaign promises, two were broken promises — repeal Obamacare and build a wall and force Mexico to fund it — two were compromises and only partly completed and one promise — the travel ban — was actually kept. The following is a breakdown of all of his promises from Trump-O-Meter:
Remember that the election is six months away, so the likelihood that many, or any, of these will get done in that short timeframe, especially given the national pandemic crisis and Trump’s ceaseless obsession with “fake news” and how he’s being portrayed in the media, instead of, you know, being a leader and actually governing.
So, what is behind the continued support Trump receives, and no doubt, will continue to receive from conservatives heading into the election? In part, blue collar America sees the president as standing up for policies that will help them, although the Republican Party’s platforms the last several decades have been anything but concerned with the working class. And since at least 2008, the rise of the Tea Party and continued influence of Fox News, members of the populist right have lived in a vacuum, an echo chamber of whatever they want to hear. Obama was the reincarnation of the “antichrist.” The Democrats, liberals, progressives, homosexuals, feminists and atheists are all immoral, ill-begotten people who want to ruin the country, or worse and even more ridiculous, are themselves tools of the “antichrist.” Were these folks to read a book, they might learn that, historically, it has been the liberals, progressives and freethinkers who have largely moved society forward and generally cared for the interests of everyday, working Americans.
Trump’s other main voting bloc out in the public, besides wealthy Wall Street banker types who are willing to support any policy that puts the health of our financial institutions and corporations above the health and well-being of people, are white evangelicals, many of whom, according to Pew, still believe that Trump is fighting for their beliefs, even if some of them question his personal behavior. One of the more telling polls by Pew is the percentage of evangelicals who think Trump is either very religious or somewhat religious (12 percent and 52 percent, respectively) compared with the general public (7 percent and 28 percent, respectively). Sixty-three percent of the general public believes that Trump is not religious. But make no mistake about it, white, born-again Christian evangelicals in 2016, despite already having plenty of documented cases of Trump’s racism, sexism and dishonesty, overwhelmingly voted for him by an 80 percent margin, according to Pew. He was their consecrated leader. Remember this photo?
That Republicans have claimed their party holds the moral high ground in America the last half century, couching it in Christian language when their policies have little, if anything, to do with the teachings of Jesus — care for the sick, the downtrodden and the least among us and meet the needs of the poor — is contemptible. The Republican calling card, since the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 70s and even before, has, in fact, been to address the interests of corporations, financial institutions and, of course, privileged white people. The platform goes like this: leverage power from the pulpit and through The Family, leverage power from Wall Street, leverage power and influence from the halls of Congress and demonize those who actually do care about the underdogs of our society: the sick, the disabled, the blue collar workers, the immigrants and inner city families. “Somewhere I read,” as Martin Luther King Jr. would say, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet, while the Democratic Party certainly contains many Christians, it is the Republican Party that has draped itself in the flag and the cross all the while eschewing the very teachings espoused in the Bible.
The populist right, then, has been duped into believing that Trump and the Republican Party has their best interests at heart. They do not. But despite the reality, and decades of evidence as support and four years of outright lies and unethical behavior from the Child-In-Chief, one of the pettiest human beings I have ever encountered, and certainly one of the most ill-fit to ever hold office, conservatives will, once again, lacking a basic understanding of context or history, foolishly vote against their own vested interests and make this a close race.
Evangelicals and white workers in small-town America believe that the Republican Party cares about them. They believe Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is in any given year, cares about them. All are demonstrably false. This is the great delusion of the last 30 years.