Trump or Biden, is this really the best the Great US of A can come up with?
Biden won't be bad -- he'll essentially be a placeholder for the 2024 election. He won't get much accomplished, but I think people are ready for a rest. For those people who think some Sanders backers may either sit on their hands, or vote for Trump, I think this may happen in some cases, since both men appeal to the same essentially populist impulse. A lot of conservatives don't understand that populists are quite tolerant of socialist economics, but are not tolerant of liberal social/cultural philosophy.
Most people think in terms of liberal vs. conservative, but that's never been the situation in the western nations, including the entire western hemisphere. We're actually divided on a four-way scale: liberals, conservatives, populists and libertarians. In the US, libertarians haven't been an effective force since the Civil War. Their numbers are small, and they tend mostly toward the Republican Party when it comes to actual voting. Of the other three, electoral politics have been dominated by liberals and conservatives, and the populists would swing back and forth between the two parties, depending on what the current dominant issues were. In general, liberals tend to be both liberal on social and economic issues -- that is, they tend to be very permissive on most social issues (abortion, gay rights, women' rights, death penalty, legalization of drugs, national medical insurance, civil rights, the exception being gun rights) and quite supportive of large government and high taxes. Conservatives are generally very restrictive on those social issues (again, the exception is guns) and, of course, are for smaller government, private property rights and lower taxes. Populists tend to side with conservatives on social issues like abortion, gay rights, death penalty, drugs) but with liberals on the economic issues -- medical insurance being the major one, but they also tend to like loose money, restrictions on corporations, taxation of the rich, and so on. They switch back and forth depending on what issues are on the foreground, which is why they voted for both Obama and Trump.
I think Trump is on his way to losing the election, with choices he is making now -- he'll try to re-open the economy in a foolish way, that is, simply throw it open. If it were done in a more nuanced way, I think he'd be more successful. I think what will happen (I may be repeating myself here) is that sometime in early May, with the rate of infection declining along with the death rate, he'll pretty much demand that everything be reopened. That will happen, and another surge of the virus will take place, and build sharply through the autumn, as more and more people have to be quarantined again, and deaths start to rise again. And he'll be toast.
The election is really Trump's to win or lose. If he simply shut up, I think he'd probably win. But he keeps stepping on his own dick. Those people who find little problems with Biden's demeanor are fooling themselves. Biden's demeanor and health won't be issues, because everything is going to be strained through large and powerful advertising and image-making industries. And Trump has provided the Democrats with endless ammunition.
