One of the things that's been driving me insane over the last two weeks or so is the blase attitude liberal political analysts are treating the current pandemic situation. This piece in USA Today is emblematic of the trend where people are pointing to Trump's growing panic over his falling poll numbers against Joe Biden, which is fueling the desire to reopen the country to put a halt to the economic disaster before November rolls around. What drives me crazy about these takes is the unspoken assumption that things will be normal enough come November for the elections to happen like normal. This idea isn't quite as dangerous as Trump's reopen at all costs, but it is in the same ballpark.
It's insane to me that there are still people thinking that the time for our lives going back to the way they used to be is just around the corner. I know I talked about this in my last piece but it bears hammering in- unless we exponentially increase our testing capacity, none of us are going anywhere anytime soon. Every expert who looks at our situation says we need to run 500,000 tests a day at least to track the transmission of the virus and safely reopen society. That estimate of what we need runs up to 5 million a day which sounds all but impossible when you consider we've only managed to do around 6.5 million tests in the last three months.
Even if we do manage to get the bare minimum of 500k tests a day, we'd be still be months behind in our testing capacity that we'd only just start to get the general outline of what our infection rate is. The idea that our testing capabilities will be up to snuff to guarantee public safety in the middle of what will probably be our second wave in the fall is, respectfully, dubious at best. When you factor in that there were 52 cases tied to the Democratic primary in Wisconsin after they were held with in-person voting, I imagine it's going to be a pretty hard sell to convince millions of people to go stand in line for hours on end all over the country.
This is a massive problem because Biden's only hope to win is high voter turnout. Almost every piece I've seen discussing the election goes out of its way to mention Biden's lead in the polls and treat that as a slam-dunk guarantee for a win in November. Sure, Biden has a five-point lead on Trump right now, which seems impressive except Hillary had a ten-point lead on Trump at this time in the 2016 election. If the candidate you're running now has half the lead after three-and-a-half years of horrific incompetence that's on full display in the middle of a pandemic, you shouldn't be celebrating.
What's more, you should consider that this is about has good as it gets for Biden. Sooner rather than later, he's going to have to start appearing on the national stage to make the case for his presidency. He won't have the safety net of his wife to speak for him, and the questions around the Tara Reade allegations will only intensify as time goes on. It's going to be a brutal onslaught after the summer, one that Biden is blatantly incapable of handling. Of Biden's supporters, only 28% say they're very enthusiastic about his campaign which, in the context of our times seems like a trivial thing to focus on but, it's really, really not.
Think of it this way- assume there's no backup election process set up by November, meaning everyone has to go out to fewer polling places and risk exposing themselves to infection. Biden is starting out four points behind Hillary's "very enthusiastic" numbers in September 2016, and that number is only going to drop the more pathetic performances Biden delivers as the campaign intensifies. If fewer and fewer people are fired up for Biden's presidency, then the fewer people are around passionate enough to convince people to brave election day.
If things keep going the way they're going, election day will revolve around one question: which candidate do you believe in to risk the lives of everyone you love by going out to vote for? We know for certain that Trump's voters will follow him to their graves, do you know any Biden supporters who will do the same?
All these factors should have Congressional Democrats scrambling like their lives depend on it to set up vote-by-mail systems across the country and get it done now. Trump has made his opposition to this well known, but you could get around this by making it look like states that support him get more aid to vote in person or whatever to make it "fair" in his eyes. They should've started this three months ago, to be honest, but the second best time would be right now. The House however, isn't scheduled to come back until next week; and since there aren't enough tests in DC to cover the members of the Senate, there's no way the House will be fully covered so who knows how long they'll be in session before they have to break when someone catches the virus.
Remote sessions and voting would be the logical solution to all these problems, but again, nothing's been done to set up such a thing up. Yes, it'd be a huge logistical hassle, but, I don't know, maybe it's worth the effort to set that up so the country isn't left to the whims of a toddler to manage the pandemic response?
At the end of the day, I'm stupefied that there are still people who honest to god in their heart of hearts believe that Trump is a problem that will, eventually, solve itself. No one does anything to stop him, no one sets up any strategy to win, they just sit back and wait for Trump to lose. This delusion means our nominal opposition party is sleep walking us into four more fucking years with this asshole.
So yeah, maybe these are things we should be worried about, and I don't know, start making sure don't happen?
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