I’m beginning to breath again after several days of waiting for the votes to be counted (Fucking thank you Republican legislators in PA and GA and Moscow Mitch for not investing in helping states out with their elections workers and machines). And yes, it is hugely disappointing the U.S. Senate, House, and state legislator race outcomes for Democrats (What went wrong??), but keep this in mind Kossacks. The Trump cult believed that Trump was going to win in a LANDSLIDE.
I’ve heard that from some Trump supporters I know. I know that the rest of you have as well. And Lord knows we have seen it on the TV when Trump supporters are interviewed. The only way that Trump could lose for them is if the election was STOLEN.
Trump has been preparing them for months now on that message. Trump was such a WINNER that he could only be beaten by cheating. And everything was going so GREAT in America, if Trump lost, it just had to be because Democrats were stealing votes.
It was the old “Tails I win. Heads you lose!” bit that kids try on one another in elementary school.
While we on the Democratic side got our hopes up because of some flawed data — the polls, Republican voters never bothered to consider that Trump would lose. And the same cannot be said of our side. How many of us were fretting every day that Trump would pull some magic act and steal the election?
I know I was.
So while we had some inaccurate data to go over time and time again, most on the Democratic side were nervous to terrified that it could be 2106 all over again. But Trump fans never lost the faith. In fact, they were impervious to facts. The economy was great, rioting was because of the liberal mobs, and COVID-19 was a hoax.
And that last part brings me to a hypothesis that I have to explain some of why Democrats came up short outside of the Biden winning. I am just thinking out loud, and I am probably dead wrong, as usual. But I think COVID-19 affected how Democrats campaigned to our detriment.
Before COVID-19, it was always said that the best way to convince anyone to vote for the Democrats is for campaign volunteers and others to go out and literally knock on people’s doors. Democratic leaning voters or the non-engaged voter has to be asked for his/her vote. This is especially true if the candidate running for office is NOT WELL KNOWN.
Joe Biden didn’t have that problem at all. If you didn’t know who Joe Biden was before he ran for president, you were either too damn young or living in a cave for decades. But COVID-19 limited his and all of our other candidates campaigning because we didn’t want to spread COVID-19.
Who didn’t have that fear of spreading COVID-19 and is now our version of Typhoid Mary: Donald Trump. Being a sociopath means never to having say you’re sorry for killing people. So he could get out and have all the big rallies he wanted.
Anyway, this is just a hypothesis. As data comes in, I bet it will not be proven. As a former scientist, I had lots of scientific experiments that proved me wrong. But I thought I would throw it out there. It doesn’t explain all of what happened in Election 2020, but it is a COMMON factor in all of our races.