Two Mike Dukakis Moments In One Day

No sooner did I post on Joe vs Donald as a comic book superhero conflict yesterday than Joe himself came out as the deliberate, conniving, and devious supervillain himself in the notorious clip that's been all over the weh this morning.

“Can you tell us, sir — Donald Trump refers himself as a political prisoner and blames you directly. What’s your response to that, sir?” a reporter asked Biden after the 81-year-old concluded his remarks on Friday in which he defended the conviction of Trump.

The reporter asked the question as Biden began to walk away after concluding his address. But after the question was posed, Biden stopped in his tracks, looked over to the reporters, and grinned, flashing his teeth.

“Do you think the conviction will have an impact on the campaign?” the reporter pressed as Biden continued to smile. He then slowly walked away without replying, seemingly with his mouth still open.

The Trump campaign promptly turned it into an ad:

Trump campaign already out with an ad on Biden’s Creepy Smirk

🔥🔥🔥

pic.twitter.com/pmjK94JokJ

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 31, 2024

But if that weren't enough, RedStaste had this headline: Joe Biden Has Awkward Mike Dukakis Moment During Trainwreck of a Meeting With the Kansas City Chiefs. He tried to put the team helmet on and failed:

The #Chiefs presented Joe Biden with his own helmet, which the players wanted him to try on.

Biden initially tried to put it on while wearing his sunglasses, but then took them off and successfully got the helmet on his head.pic.twitter.com/DQ8WNAYdwn

— Ari Meirov (@MySportsUpdate) May 31, 2024

He wants to appropriate the vibe of a winner, but he can't help losing. But I think the smirking visual in the wake of the New York hush money verdict is by far the more important. In August of 2021, I'd begun to get Joe's number when I referred to "Biden's view of himself as a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations."

When the reporter asks what his reaction is to Trump's allegation that he's behind it, he essentially takes a bow and says, "Yup, that was me. Deal with it!" The problem is, of course, that he's just given Trump priceless campaign fodder. But it goes farther than that -- Trump knows he's got a winning formula, and he's going to keep working it:

Donald Trump discussed two witnesses in the criminal case against him Friday while complaining about his conviction, comments that could violate the judge's gag order against him.

. . . Trump mentioned Robert Costello, a witness who testified on Trump’s behalf, by name during his remarks at Trump Tower, and also went on at length about his former attorney Michael Cohen, a key witness whose name he did not use but was clearly the person he was referring to.

“This was a highly qualified lawyer. Now I’m not allowed to use his name because of the gag order, but you know he’s a sleazebag. Everybody knows that. Took me a while to find out,” Trump said, also pushing back on Cohen's description of himself as a "fixer."

What he's angling for, of course, is another angry outburst from Judge Merchan, including more threats to put him in jail for violating the gag order -- and this after Biden with his smug grin has just implicitly acknowledged he was behind the whole thing. All this will do is continue to unify more Republicans behind Trump's candidacy, including, as of yesterday, Senators McConnell and Collins, and continue to prompt record donations to his campaign.

Brer Rabbit always got enough lip for anybody and everybody. He even told God once what He'd done wrong on the third day of Creation. This time, though Brer Rabbit talked mighty humble. "Well, Brer Fox. No doubt about it. You got me and no point in my saying that I would improve my ways if you spared me."

"No point at all," Brer Fox agreed as he started gathering kindling for the fire.

"I guess I'm going to be barbecue this day." Brer Rabbit sighed. "But getting barbecued is a whole lot better than getting thrown in the briar patch." He sighed again. "No doubt about it. Getting barbecued is almost a blessing compared to being thrown in that briar patch on the other side of the road. If you got to go, go in a barbecue sauce. That's what I always say. How much lemon juice and brown sugar you put in yours?"

Gutfeld noted in his monologue last night that Trump had told Joe to "buckle up" -- but Gutfeld said there's only thing Joe buckles up for these days, and he ran a picture of a handicapped toilet.

If the US president is the butt of handicapped toilet jokes on late-night, I get the feeling something's changed. We're maybe even out of Dukakis-on-the-tank-territory and into Jimmy-Carter-and-the-killer-rabbit, but I don't think it's going to stop there.

The Emperor Palpatine

This is the part of the 1953 sci-fi movie where the scientists realize the high voltage lines & atom bombs only make the monster bigger

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 2, 2017

I saw the post just above on Instapundit this morning, thinking it was a reaction to yesterday's verdict, but I suddenly realized it's dated July 2, 2017. You can say things about Trump one time, and they turn out to be just as applicable to other situations. Greg Gutfeld made a similar reference to pop-culture paradigms in last night's monologue:

The good news is that as this trial descended into an absurdity of corruption, Trump's numbers have been going up, while Joe Biden's keep falling, like Joe Biden himself. Turns out Americans love it when one man fights against a corrupt system with his back up against the wall, just as much as they detest a dementia-ridden dirtbag who's spent half a century padding his life with your money. . . . It ain't over til the fat lady sings, and that fat lady is America.

In other words, Joe as dementia-ridden dirtbag morphs into Star Wars's Emperor Palpatine, who Wikipedia says "has become a widely recognized symbol of evil in popular culture." Well, here's an intriguing essay on the hero in popular culture:

[I]n Pop Culture heroes, especially American ones, never seem to want to be heroes, they are forced to confront some horrendous situation. The Popular Culture hero never steps out to be heroic, he doesn’t go around looking for trouble. . . . The hero in most of these scenarios is a reactive force, a passive weapon that flips into action only when activated. . . . The hero is improvising in this reactive state, he is an action hero. The Pop Culture hero is not a thinking man, he doesn’t plan, he doesn’t contemplate the situation, he doesn’t search for alternatives only a way out. The hero is always directly contrasted to the Pop Culture villain who is portrayed as the thoughtful one, an intellect – he plans, he contemplates, he devises. The hero is portrayed as youthful talent and potential, the villain as an intellectual plotter, a seasoned decadent with an angry, vengeful axe to grind. This Popular Culture scenario plays out in American life every single day in a myriad of ways, and it is now playing out in our current political season with Pop Culture references to heroism abounding.

This was in fact written in 2008, before anyone ever thought of Trump as anything but a wealthy playboy turned reality TV star. Trump is nearly as old as Biden, but Gutfeld is correct when he contrasts Trump, the improviser who campaigns from the courtroom, with Joe the dementia-ridden dirtbag. And nobody left or right has ever characterized Trump as a thinker -- in fact, he cultivates a certain anti-intellectual persona.

Trump as a pop-culture hero reminds me perhaps most of Christian Bale's very contemporary Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, which was released in 2012, also before anyone ever thought of Trump as a politician:

[Writer-Director Christopher] Nolan has stated that, due to the eight-year gap between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, "he's an older Bruce Wayne; he's not in a great state.". . . . Bale acknowledged that Batman is "not a healthy individual, this is somebody that is doing good, but he's right on the verge of doing bad". Bale clarifies that "He doesn't want to forget [his parents' deaths]. He wants to maintain that anger he felt at that injustice".

There's also a mythic pattern to the Batman character in the Dark Knight Rises's story line. Bruce Wayne becomes a recluse and abandons his role as Batman, while the police commissioner blames "the Batman" for a current crime spree. In fact, Wayne is trapped by Bane, the supervillain, and consigned to an underground prison. Bane then releases criminals from Gotham's jail, who take over the city, and has Gotham's elite exiled and killed in kangaroo courts. Months later, Bruce escapes from the underground prison, returns to Gotham as Batman, and restores order to the city.

There's something similar in Trump's current story arc. He's improbably elected president in 2016, beset by manufactured scandals and plots by the Deep State, defeated in 2020 in a stolen election, but it looks like he'll return in 2024 -- not necessarily as a good guy, maybe even as a good guy on the verge of doing bad.

There's resonance to this story. That's my takeaway from yesterday's verdict.

The Paradigm Is Shifting

Yesterday I posted on how uncomfortable I've become with the RealClearPolitics model of the election, whereby Trump leads Biden by a small aggregate anount in battleground states, and this situation hasn't changed in six months. Yet issues like inflation and illegal immigration haven't been fixed. while Biden's deteriorating physical and mental condition have become increasingly visible. On top of that, the enthusiasm levels of the Trump and Biden campaigns are increasingly in contrast.

I pointed to little-reported trends in states outside the conventional-wisdom battlegrounds like Minnesota, Oregon, and Virginia, and by coincidence, I noticed a new Roanoke College poll that says Trump is tied with Biden in Virginia.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are tied (42%-42%) in a head-to-head matchup in Virginia, while Biden holds a two-point lead (40%-38%) when other candidates are included, according to the Roanoke College Poll. The Institute for Policy and Opinion Research (IPOR) at Roanoke College interviewed 711 likely voters in Virginia between May 12 and May 21, 2024. The survey has a weighted margin of error of 4.24%.

. . . This is the first time the Roanoke College Poll has shown the candidates tied, although the polls in February 2024 and November 2023 showed them within the margin of error.

Other Virginia polls have also been showing movement. RealClearPolitics itself lists only three polls since last December, including this most recent from Roanoke College. A Richmond Times-Dispatch poll from December 15-19 had Biden over Trump 49-43. A Virginia Commonwealth University poll from December 28 to January 13 had Biden over Trump 43-40.

That there are so few polls from an important state just outside the consensus battleground group is puzzling in itself, but if those polls are showing anything, they're showing that broader opinion is moving, while the polls from the battleground states aren't. As a contrarian, this suggests to me that there's a consensus methodology that's using data from a set group of "battleground" states that were battlegrounds only in 2016 and 2020 to impose a model on the 2024 election. This feeds my sense that Rush Limbaugh was right, that the polls are meant to shape the news, not report it.

There's a more complete discussion of the problems with the battleground theory at The American Spectator, The 2024 Battleground Grows and Tilts Toward Trump.

It is not just that the states that decided 2020’s outcome are increasingly leaning toward Trump — although they are. There are also strong indications that more states could play a potentially determinant role in 2024’s outcome and that these, too, are moving closer toward Trump.

. . . There are also strong indicators that five states not considered battleground states in 2020 could be today. Then, Biden won these by seemingly safe margins: Maine (9.1 percent), Minnesota (7.1 percent), New Hampshire (7.3 percent), New Mexico (10.8 percent), and Virginia (10.1 percent). However, recent polls show that Biden’s falling fortunes are having an impact here too.

. . . The six battleground states that Biden won in 2020 by less than 3 percent of the popular vote — and all of which he now trails — account for 77 electoral votes. Five second-tier battleground states of 2020 — which Biden won and, if Minnesota and New Hampshire are indicative, are now potentially in play this November — account for another 34 electoral votes.

What this means is that Biden is defending potentially 111 electoral votes, from which Trump only needs to win 35. In contrast, Biden has only one state, North Carolina (and he is trailing in polls there by far larger margins than the one he lost by in 2020) with 16 electoral votes, with which to potentially compensate for any electoral votes that Trump flips from him.

So this is suggesting there's something fundamentally wrong with the RealClearPolitics model: right now, RCP has poll aggregates showing Trump leading Biden by 0.9% in the popular vote, although this is meaningless, since the president is elected by the Electoral College. RCP has a separate Electoral College prediction based entirely on its aggregates in the consensus battlegound states, which has Trump leading by 219-215, a similar tossup assessment -- and this also hasn't moved in months. It then has a "no tossups" total 0f 312-226, which has likewise been static for months, but if there's an explanation of what the methodology here is, I haven't found it.

By the same token, the RCP list of seven "battlegrounds" hasn't changed for many months: Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsyhlvania, North Carolina, and Nevada. But the Americn Spectator piece makes an important point:

According to RCP polling averages, Biden now trails in each and by 3 percentage points (44.6 percent to 47.7 percent) in all combined. In North Carolina, the only battleground state Trump won in 2020, Biden’s deficit has increased from 1.3 percent four years ago to 4.8 percent today.

Wait a moment. Why is North Carolina even listed in the "battleground" group if Biden lost it in 2020 and seems almost certain to lose it in 2024? What was the logic of all those "battleground" choices? For instance, they aren't even listed in alphabetical order, it's just sort of a list without much of a reason for being there, and right now, Trump's likely to win all or most of them. So why are they "battlegrounds"? Why not start to add states like Virginia, New Hampshire, or Minnesota to the list and maybe even take states like Nevada or North Carolina off it? Wouldn't that more accurately depict the current state of the campaigns?

The current received line is that the election is a tossup, and Sean Trende is apparently in the middle of declaring that it's a tossup if the election is a tossup. This works to the Democrats' advantage by giving people like Dr Jill the credibility to say "those polls are going to turn, I’m confident of it.”

But if it were a tossup, the prominent anonymous Democrats wouldn't be freaking out.

Sean Trende: Are We Too Bearish On Trump?

Sean Trende, the Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics, is the keeper of the conventional wisdom on Trump's outlook for the election. The odd thing is that the Democrats, other than Biden himself, are the ones who've signed on to it. For instance, Clinton pollster Mark Penn takes the conventional line just this morning at RCP:

Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the Harvard-CAPS/Harris polls by about 5 points and in the FoxNews polls by 3 points as of May 24. It is closer in the Real Clear Politics average that shows a gap of only 1.1%, but swing state polls across the media show Trump routs in almost all of them.

What bothers me is that none of this has changed in six months. Public perceptions of the New York hush money trial have been, if anything, favorable toward Trump. Rallies and campaign events like those in New Jersey and the Bronx have been surprisingly well-attended. In contrast, Biden's public performance has been consistently embarrassing, and there are increasing calls for him to step aside. But the RealClearPolitics averages haven't moved in many months. I'm inclined to attribute this to Rush Limbaugh's theorem that the pollsters' aim is to demoralize Republicans and keep up Democrat hopes that Biden can still turn things around.

Now even Sean Trende is at least teasing a reassessment. At RCP yesterday, he ran a piece, Are We Too Bearish on Trump?

I think if you asked most analysts to publicly assess the presidential race, they would say it is some form of a tossup. Maybe some would give Trump a 52% chance of winning or some would give Biden a 51% chance, but most would be in the range of a 50-50 outcome.

I’m in that bucket as well, but I’m starting to rethink the wisdom of my position. In particular, I’m wondering if there isn’t some combination of “safety in numbers” and “unthinkability bias” at work. To state the first possibility more plainly, if everyone has this as a roughly 50-50 race, no one is out on a limb, and, well, they can’t fire all of us if we’re all wrong together!

More accurately, they can't fire the whole group for groupthink, but the whole group can be laid off if the company goes out of business. Trende goes through possible reasons to think the race isn't a tossup. For instance, referring to polling over Brexit, which was thought to be a tossup, but which passed 52%-48%,

. . . everyone agreed the polling suggested a tossup but thought things would eventually work out for the Remain side (mostly because they couldn’t fathom Britain voting to leave the EU). But that’s not how tossups work. If people really thought it was a tossup, about half should have been willing to predict Britain would leave. Likewise, if everyone is agreeing with a negative assessment of the playing field but then calling the race a tossup, is it really a tossup?

RealClearPolitics's own betting average this morning shows the odds of a Trump win are 51.5 vs Biden 36.3. This isn't a tossup. Trende goes on to note that Biden's State of the Union didn't change things, and neither has the New York hush money trial. He concludes,

Maybe the third opportunity, the debates, will really change things (my take: they might). But the real point is that things have to change for Biden to win. I don’t think anyone disputes that at this point. We have a word for races like that, and it isn’t “tossup.”

But then, astonishingly, but maybe predictably for RealClearPolitics, he announces, "Next week: The case for the race remaining a tossup." But this avoids the need to ask real questions like, "Why is Trump effectively ahead when the poll averages keep making it look like a tossup?" But this implicitly questions the poll averages, which are Sean Trende's livelihood, so he's going to treat the question of whether it's a tossup as a tossup itself.

This piece by Eric Levitz at Vox is much more insightful. He takes up the question of why blacks, Latins, and young people are leaving the Democrats:

2024 will witness a historically rapid shift in the demographics of the Republican and Democratic coalitions. Which is odd, considering that the two parties are running the same candidates as they did four years ago.

. . . I’ve been toying with a different theory of the president’s woes, one that makes better sense of his peculiar demographic weaknesses: Voters with low levels of trust in society and the political system are shifting rightward.

. . . Donald Trump redefined the GOP in the eyes of many, associating the party with a paranoid vision of American life and a populist contempt for the nation’s political system.

Levitz goes on to argue that issues like the COVID lockdowns and madatory vaccinations increased institutional distrust across the board, and the 2024 election is largely about institutional distrust -- and some part of that distrust is the claim that the 2020 election was "stolen".

[T]he possibility that part of Biden’s problem lies with low-trust voters is worth taking seriously — not least because, if true, it would imply that the president is actually in worse shape than polls suggest.

Distrustful voters participate in surveys, but they do so at much lower rates than high-trust voters do. Which makes sense: If you believe that you can’t be too careful with other people, you probably aren’t going to take a lengthy phone call from a stranger.

And of course, the amount of distrust in legacy media is steadily increasing, while polls and poll aggregates are the creatures of legacy media -- but even this leaves aside the entirely prudent reluctance of many people to disclose their political preference to a stranger who claims to be a pollster. Right, when the FBI inflitrates Catholic parishes looking for right-wing terrorists. Levitz concludes,

The president is reportedly averse to considering this possibility. To the contrary, according to Axios, Biden is convinced that the polls are underestimating his support. This is certainly conceivable, but there is little basis for assuming as much. And given the evidence that social and political trust might be influencing voters’ behavior, it would be reckless for Biden to run as though he’s ahead. More concretely, if the president is trailing badly — as a consequence of tepid support among distrustful voters who want change — he might be well-advised to embrace a much different messaging strategy than his current one.

Back when I worked in IT, the truism was nobody got fired for choosing IBM -- but that was in the 1980s. IBM is now just a niche supplier. Sean Trende reminds me of the IBMers of a past generation.

Dems In Full-Blown ‘Freakout’?

The big news this morning is the headline in Politico, Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden.

“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.

But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.

Except just this past weekend,

Prominent Democratic strategist James Carville slammed his own party Saturday in a rant in which he called its messaging “full of s–t” — and accused the Biden campaign of worrying too much about the war in Gaza.

Carville, who helped run Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 White House campaign, ripped into national Democrats as polls continue to show President Biden struggling in his likely rematch with former President Donald Trump.

As early as February,

Ezra Klein, a prominent liberal columnist for The New York Times, published an audio essay Friday making his case against President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, saying he should withdraw from the race and allow delegates to pick from a slate of candidates with a better shot at defeating Donald Trump in November.

“We had to wait till this year — till now, really — to see Biden even begin to show what he’d be like on the campaign trail. And what I think we’re seeing is that he is not up for this,” Klein said on his popular semi-weekly podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”

Yrt again, let's put these calls in context. The point isn't that they're coming, the point is how early they're coming in the cycle. Michael Dukakis had been ahead in the 1988 election polls until he rode an Abrams tank on September 13. That image turned things around:

On Monday, Sept. 19, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak offered perhaps the most devastating press account yet in their syndicated column. “Howls of laughter echoed through Bush headquarters in Washington,” they wrote, “where ridicule was prepared for the candidate’s speech Friday. Democratic insiders could only shake their heads in dismay.”

By Tuesday, one poll found that Dukakis had lost significant ground, with 25 percent saying they were less likely to vote for him because of the tank ride.

Election Day was seven weeks away.

The curret round of freakouts is taking place five months before the election. Another disastrous moment in a campaign, John Kerry's windsurfing escapade, became a decisive issue throughout September 2004, and by late that month, the Bush campaign had turned it into a devastating commercial. Before that,

YOU'D think John Kerry could be excused for wanting to spend a summer afternoon on the water.

Instead, David Letterman mocked him for windsurfing instead of campaigning. Jay Leno played the flip-flop card, quipping that even Mr. Kerry's hobby depends on which way the wind blows.

Zell Miller, who could himself be accused of being flip-flopper-in-chief, derided Mr. Kerry's swim trunks as "silly little bicycle pants."

Again, this took place, like Dukakis's tank ride, in September, during the traditional campaign season. Even Thomas Eagleton withdrew from the McGovern campaign in 1972 as vice presidential candidate after he had been nominated at the convention, 99 days before the election, although Democrat insiders had already determined that McGovern had no chance against Nixon without Ted Kennedy on the ticket, which Kennedy had refused to join.

Another unique feature of this year's campaign has been that that unlike Dukakis or Kerry, Biden hasn't been ahead in the polls at all this year, and there's been no single late campaign error like the tank or the windsurfing that turned things around. In fact, I've argued that the pervasive issue that underlies the national mood, of which more specific problems like inflation and illegal immigration are just indicators, is the sense that the 2020 election was stolen, and we have an opportunity to reverse it.

And the polls simply aren't performing their usual function this year. I keep referring to Rush Limbaugh's observation that their purpose is normally to demoralize Republicans, especially in cases like 1980 and 2016, when they simply proved incorrect as predictions of electoral results. This year, they've been focusing almost exclusively on the swing states that Trump lost in 2020 but seems likely to regain this year, and the peculiar picture they've tried to show over a period of many months is that they haven't budged, with Trump remaining narrowly ahead in most.

Data points like the Wildwood, NJ or Bronx rallies keep emmerging as surprises in this context, along with individual polls showing Trump doing well in states like Minnesota, Oregon, Virginia, and New Hampshire, which on one hand are dismissed as outliers, yet there seems to be no effort at serious followup. Are those outliers or not? Maybe the pollsters are too timid to find out.

The fact that insiders are sending up anonymous warnings so many months in advance of the traditional campaign season is just one indicator of how bad things may be for Biden.

So Early In The Cycle

The one thing I've noticed throughout this election cycle is how early everything has been taking place vis-a-vis all the other presidential election cycles I've lived through. I've mentioned here several times that previous leaks from insiders that a losing campsign isn't going well tend to happen in late summer and early fall; this time, we saw calls from influential Democrats for Joe to withdraw as early as February. Just this past week, the Biden campaign issued the ad linked above, which is a last-ditch play to win back African-American voters by taking out-of-context remarks from Trump as long ago as 1989 to prove he's a racist.

This reminded me of Jimmy Carter's failing campaign in 1980 and his desperate attempt to brand Ronald Reagan as a racist -- except this took place that September, not in May, which Biden is doing this year:

It was a mistake, tactically, to call Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign racist. Reagan’s opponent, Jimmy Carter, made that error in a September address at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. had served as the co-pastor. “You’ve seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like states’ rights in a speech in Mississippi,” Carter said, adding that “hatred has no place in this country.”

. . . Carter’s statement about code words and hatred reoriented the conversation about Reagan and the Neshoba County Fair, but not in the way Carter intended. Instead of focusing on Reagan’s speech, its effect on black Americans, and what it implied about how he’d govern, the political press concentrated on Carter’s decision to chide Reagan and the tone he’d used in doing so.

Oddly, the 1980 election is remembered as one of the few in which the candidate who was leading in the polls, in that case Carter, was upset by the candidate who was trailing, in that case Reagan.

Reagan's late-breaking surge that year is generally attributed to the only presidential debate between Carter and Reagan -- held one week before the election, on Oct. 28 -- which seemed to move voter preferences in Reagan's direction, as well as the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, which reached its one-year anniversary on Election Day. After trailing Carter by 8 points among registered voters (and by 3 points among likely voters) right before their debate, Reagan moved into a 3-point lead among likely voters immediately afterward, and he won the Nov. 4 election by 10 points.

But let's apply Rush Limbaugh's insight here. The polling companies use the polls to shape the election, not report the news. Only as the election gets closer in time, "all of these polling companies are gonna want to be right when it’s all over". Carter was desperate by September, whether he was leading in the polls or not. Reagan won the 1980 election by 10 points in the popular vote and the Electoral College 489-49.

The link above attributes this result to the October 28 Reagan-Carter debate, but it's hard to avoid thinking this was to save the reputation of the pollsters, who needed some sort of very late development to explain what was a massive landslide upset by Reagan. In retrospect, the "malaise" speech of July 15, 1979, the Iranian hostage crisis, which began November 4, 1979, and even the visual of Carter collapsing during a race near Camp David that September all played a part, as well as high inflation, and the pollsters were likely ignoring the real national mood.

Carter's problem was that by the start of his fall 1980 campaign, it had already been overtaken by events, and his desperation in September was a reflection of that. But in 1980, nobody was desperate as early as May, although Ted Kennedy was running a primary campaign against Carter -- but Carter had performed well enough in the primaries to ensure his nomination by early June. Nevertheless, the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt in April did damage Carter's ultimate standing.

What we're seeing at this point now, though, is completely different. Biden had no significant opposition in the primaries; Trump also quickly became the presumptive nominee, and the presidential campaign for the November elecdtion is well under way. The consensus is that for Biden to have challenged Trump to debates and tacitly agreed to one as early as June reflects Biden's already-weak position -- indeed, the potential that a poor enough performance gives the Democrats leeway to replace him before the convention.

What we're now seeing is the Biden campaign telegraphing its intent to leverage the upcoming verdict in the New York "hush money" trial:

Biden intends to initially address the verdict in a White House setting — not a campaign one — to show his statement isn’t political, according to the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Cough, cough. The link continues,

The Biden team’s plans are still being deliberated and could change, the people familiar said. The White House and Biden campaign declined comment.

. . . Biden doesn’t “need to engage with it, because everyone else will,” [think tank executive Matt] Bennett said. “He is the only person who could in some ways lessen the political impact of this by getting involved, because Trump could then make the case that the verdict is political.”

But whatever the outcome of the trial, and however Biden responds to it, his campaign, perhaps even more than Carter's in 1980, has already been overtaken by events -- but this is May, not September or October.

The Bronx Rally

It's hard to enumerate all the takeaways from Trump's Bronx rally, which seems to have dominated yesterday's news. It's a contrarian's paradise.

Let's go to what almost nobody's mentioned, the attempt by the left at a counterdemonstration:

When I exit the park, I happen upon dozens of police officers in riot gear. Young men and women—draped in keffiyehs and many in N95 masks—are standing behind them on a giant rock, shaking a sign that says, “[redacted] Trump / [redacted] Biden / The people of the Bronx / We run this [redacted].”

“They don’t give a [redacted] about you,” the protesters chant at the Trump crowd, clapping between words.

The police were there in riot gear to anticipate any contingency, but my impression from the few accounts in the media is that there simply weren't enough potential counterdemonstrators there to start a riot, much as they would have wanted one. I imagine that the media was disappointed, too -- a riot would have been clickbait, and it would have fed the narrative that Trump supporters are brownshirts, but it didn't happen.

This brings me to something else that didn't happen -- the George Floyd-BLM riots of 2020-2023 began the Tuesday following the Memorial Day weekend of 2020, May 26 of that year. One of the conditions that fed those was the COVID lockdowns, when the authorites from Dr Fauci on down announced that rioters were exercising their first amendment rights:

Fauci said that public health officials like himself should caution protesters to wear a mask and keep it on at all times if they do go out to protest.

On the other hand, apparently holding a Trump campaign rally during the pandemic was not an equivalent exercise of first-amendment rights, as Trump canceled a good many throughout that campaign, and those he did hold were heavily criticized:

President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies led to more than 30,000 coronavirus cases, according to a new paper posted by researchers at Stanford.

. . . The researchers found that the rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. They also concluded that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths, though not necessarily among attendees.

On the other hand, the "researchers" didn't find any equivalent spike in COVID cases after the BLM riots!

Protests against systemic racism held in 300-plus U.S. cities following the death of George Floyd did not cause a significant increase in coronavirus infections, according to a team of economists who have published their findings in a 60-page paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research; these somewhat surprising results are supported by Covid-19 testing data in many populous cities where demonstrations were held.

I was intrigued to watch one discussion of Thursday's Bronx rally where a commentator minimized it saying that Trump had huge crowds everywhere in 2020, but he still lost. No, actually, he didn't, he canceled a good many rallies throughout 2020, and the COVID moral panic attached a stigma to attending the ones he did hold. There was a contrarian opinion in 2020 that the COVID panic was generated specifically at least in part to limit Trump's ability to campaign via rallies, and whether the intent was there, it certainly succeeded in doing this.

In addition, BLM riots were tacitly endorsed by the public health authorities, while Trump rallies were discouraged, so BLM riots became one of the few outlets for people with cabin fever to vent their frustrations, when Trump rallies were represented as a public health menace. This year, people at least have a clearer choice between Trump rallies and BLM riots, and so far, with the campus pogroms as the exception, people seem to be choosing Trump rallies.

I doubt if there's time to gin up a new epidemic to have an equivalent effect before November -- the 2020 lockdowns began, after all, that March. Instead, we have the New Jersey and Bronx Trump rallies establishing powerful countervailing media examples -- in 2020, media coverage of BLM riots gave the impressionable "permission" to use them as an outlet, while "permission" to attend Trump rallies was implictly withheld.

In 2024, with the media somewhat befuddled and definitely behind the curve, Trump rallies are major media events. Trump is an entertaining figure in his own right, but South Bronx residents wearing MAGA hats are also a man-bites-dog story that the media has to cover in spite of itself. And the Bronx rally took place just before a slow news holiday weekend.

Do you seriously think Trump doesn't understand this? He's had four years to recalibrate and rethink his strategy, but it's also better to be lucky than smart. Trump at this point is both.