I have written a lot about Donald Trump’s weakness as a candidate, but even the weakest candidate is actually quite strong if the systems and structures around him whitewash his liabilities and support him.
Fact is, Trump has that support – from the Washington press corps, the rightwing media apparatus, the US Supreme Court, the Republican Party, the Electoral College and the billionaire class, in addition to the country’s general orientation toward white people’s preferences.
On consideration, Trump is the affirmative-action candidate, to borrow from the right’s dishonest interpretation of that policy. He’s bad at politics. He’ll never not be bad. But he can be bad and still be viable, as long as the systems and structures around him support him.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden can’t possibly be a bad candidate. To be sure, he might have liabilities – his age, say – but he’s not bad. He can’t be. In the process of earning his success, he has shown he must be not only good but damn near perfect just to be running even with a candidate so bad that no one alive has seen his likes before but who nevertheless is viable because the systems and structures around him support him.
Here we should recognize a key difference between this election and the last one. The last election was in the middle of a pandemic, and in that context, Trump lost the support of one of his current benefactors. The owners of the country’s most lucrative media properties were in no mood to play along with him. His attacks on Joe Biden, which were the same attacks that we are seeing this time around, mostly fell into partisan silos, unable to reach beyond the Republican Party’s base.
But this year is different. The pandemic is over, memories of the danger have faded. So the press corps has gotten back to basics, which is to say, it has gone back to playing along while ignoring virtually anything that does not fit into an established narrative about Biden. The result is a Dow Jones Industrial Average closing over 40,000 on Friday for the first time in its history – and it was a one-day story.
In the past, such a milestone would have launched wave after wave of commentary from highly visible and politically moderate personalities about what Biden’s policies have done and how they are reshaping everything we thought we understood about macroeconomics. At the very least, there would be a heated debate tightly concentrated on this broad metric of presidential success. But there isn’t even a debate.
I don’t know why that is, not exactly, but the reason probably has something to do with the owners of the country’s most lucrative media properties being generally oriented toward the Republican Party, which no longer worships the god of the marketplace, as the god of the marketplace can run counter to the interests of the Republican Party. Even as Biden’s economic policies enrich the owners of the country’s most lucrative media properties, they can’t or won’t give too much attention to that achievement for fear of appearing biased.
In any case, Biden’s economic policies are explicitly geared toward people who work, not people who own so much they don’t have to work. If I were one of the owners of the country’s most lucrative media properties, I might also prefer that the story of the Dow closing over 40,000 for the first time be limited to a day, because a more sustained level of attention might be seen as an indirect concession to the liberal argument that everything is better when wealth does not trickle down.
The inevitable result of a Washington press corps that’s gotten back to basics, which is to say, gotten back to playing along, is polling that shows two candidates who are not anywhere close to being equal being equal. The Economist’s polling average has them in a statistical dead heat (meaning whatever difference there is falls in the margin of error). Ditto for 538’s polling averages. Same at Real Clear Politics.
Some will complain. It shouldn’t be this way. I’d agree. But we mustn’t lose sight of the systems and structures, especially the country’s general orientation toward white people’s preferences, that support a bad candidate while a good candidate must figure out how to win on his own. Presidential politics is not an even playing field. It never was.
But that doesn’t mean the president can’t win. I see hope in the fact that Biden is in a statistical dead heat with Trump. The systems and structures that support Trump never stop engaging in politics. Biden’s supporters, however, tend to engage in politics only when there’s an election. That Biden is now tied with Trump suggests he’s made up for lost ground, and he’s done that, because his supporters are becoming more engaged in politics as we get closer to Election Day. My hope is that the closer we get, the more Biden will take the lead over Trump.
