AN HOMAGE TO JEAN-LUC

Fans of Star Trek the Next Generation may recall the 1992 episode “The Inner Light.” In that episode the Enterprise encounters a space object from which radiates a strong signal that takes possession of Picard and renders him unconscious on the floor. When Picard recovers consciousness, he finds himself on a planet where, over a long lifetime, he marries, has children, has grandchildren, until finally, falling asleep one night he awakens back on the Enterprise to find that he has been unconscious not for a lifetime but for 25 minutes.

 

The current political campaign makes me wonder whether, like Picard, I have been possessed by a space object and will awaken soon to find that the last four years have been merely an elaborate dream. The present political campaign is been going on for so long that I’m surprised my grandchildren do not have grandchildren by now. Some of my readers may be too young to recall the first presidential Democratic Party nominating debate, which took place 15 months and a day ago on June 26, 2019. The South Carolina primary took place shortly before my retirement community went into lockdown and in all the intervening time, with debates, polls, scandals, and conventions, I have been sitting here staying safe and going nowhere.

 

During all of that time, the polls have been astonishingly unchanging. Indeed, when one looks at those interactive charts plotting changes in the gap between the two candidates over time, one finds that save for the inevitable sampling noise, simply nothing has changed. The impeachment didn’t make much noticeable difference, the racial protests didn’t make much difference, the pandemic didn’t make much difference, the crash of the American economy didn’t make much difference, the Democratic convention didn’t make much difference, and neither did the Republican convention. Biden has throughout this entire time maintained a lead in the national polls of between five and 10 percent, with the average usually being seven or eight percent.

 

The day after tomorrow, the first debate will take place. Voting has  started – indeed, as I repeat proudly on this blog, my absentee ballot has already been received and accepted by the Chatham County Board of Elections. With only five weeks to go, this debate is really the last time when things can change. As I see it, there are only two events that might occur during the debate that could have any effect on the election, one favorable to Trump and the other favorable to Biden. The first is that Biden might come out and reveal himself to be a stumblebum suffering from advanced dementia. That would presumably help Trump, although the Republican campaign has recently stopped saying that Biden is gaga and started complaining that he has 45 years of experience and therefore should be expected to do brilliantly. The other possible event is that Trump will come out and, forced to speak extemporaneously for more than a few moments, will start to wander incoherently in his answers and perhaps even take umbrage at one of Chris Wallace’s questions and abruptly walk out. That would presumably help Biden.

 

Assuming that neither of these occurs, I think we can assume that as we enter the last 35 days of the campaign, the polls are not going to change very much. I don’t see how they could get any worse for Trump and I think it is unlikely that they will get significantly better. What might that mean? Well, this election is widely predicted to see a record-breaking turnout, perhaps reaching 70% of eligible voters. That would be 165 million votes cast. A 7% edge for Biden, which is clearly what the polls are predicting, translates into a raw vote win of 11.5 million votes. I do not think there is any way in the world that a win of that size could be overcome by a series of razor thin wins in battleground states of the sort that put Trump into the White House in 2016. Clinton it will be recalled won the popular vote in 2016 by 2 .9 million votes, a number significantly smaller than her margin in the state of California. There is just no way that Joe Biden can run up a margin of 10 million or more votes without, along the way, taking the majority of the electoral votes.

 

The only way for Trump to win is to flat out cheat, but that is a subject for another post.