Biden Can't Win; He Can Only Count On Trump Losing, Which Appears Likely

My friend Dorothy Reik was recently elected to the L.A. County Democratic Party Central Committee. She received more votes than anyone else who has ever run for that position. Ever! Yesterday, Reik wrote to subscribers of her influential daily update list that "Bernie was on Chris Hayes last night and Velshi this morning. He also hosts town halls on line. Where is Biden??? The sad truth is that the Democratic establishment was not worried that Bernie would lose-- their biggest fear was that he would WIN!"

The Democratic Party is operating on a theory that anyone can beat Trump because no matter how much he spends and no matter what tactics he uses, the election will be a referendum on him and a pile of dogshit will beat him. So the Democratic establishment has chosen a pile of dogshit to run-- and if the pile of dogshit becomes too untenable, they have several more piles in the wings and ready to go. Anyone but Bernie (or Elizabeth).

Even senior citizens-- the mainstay, along with the evangelicals, of the Republican coalition-- are abandoning Trump because of his horrific response to the pandemic. "For years," wrote a NY Times team pf reporters, "Republicans and Mr. Trump have relied on older Americans, the United States’ largest voting bloc, to offset Democrats’ advantage with younger voters. But seniors are also the most vulnerable to the coronavirus, and the Trump campaign’s internal polls show his support among voters over age 65 softening to a concerning degree, people familiar with the numbers said. A recent Morning Consult poll found that Mr. Trump’s approval rating on the handling of the coronavirus was lower with seniors than with any other group other than young voters." In several polls ole Status Quo Joe holds a 10-point advantage among voters who are 65 and older. Meanwhile, Señor Trumpanzee has basically moved on from anything but pretending to focus on controlling the pandemic to pushing an "agenda to restore the country to a place that will lift his campaign," no matter how many (old) people die in the process.

This week the U.S. will clock in with a million and a half infections and come close to the 100,000 deaths mark, about a quarter of whom are residents of nursing homes.

Trump is shedding supporters from elderly voters but Biden isn't exactly setting the younger electorate on fire with enthusiasm. Reporting for NBC News on the results of a focus group by Global Strategy Group on behalf of NextGen America, Sahil Kapur wrote last week that Biden is in no danger of losing young voters to Trump. "But he faces a lack of enthusiasm among Millennials and Gen Z voters with the potential to decide his fate if they stay home or vote for a third-party candidate. Many of these voters preferred Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and perceive Biden as a blank slate. They aren’t sure that he’s a change agent or that his policies match the scale of their problems. Some worry about his age and fitness. Most seem open to supporting Biden to stop Trump but need to hear more from him... But the election is six months away and if the new focus groups are any indication, Biden is still ill-defined for many young voters. 'Biden is unknown,' the Global Strategy Group study concluded. 'He became the nominee in the middle of the coronavirus crisis. Like many other voters, these ones are still getting to know Joe.'"

On Friday, Billboard reported that so far musicians who backed Bernie are sitting out the Biden campaign. Bernie's high-profile musician supporters who actively campaigned for him included Ariana Grande, Jack White, Neil Young, Cardi B, the Strokes, Halsey, Snoop Dogg, Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz, Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Public Enemy, Roger Waters, Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, Sonic Youth, Norah Jones, Jello Biafra, Pussy Riot, the Wonder Years, Sacred Reich, Ani DiFranco, Michael Stipe, Ozomatli, Tony! Toni! Toné!, Billy Bragg, and Killer Mike. These artists and their fans aren't Democrats. As far as their politics go, they are looking for agents of change-- like Bernie-- not partisan hacks-- like Biden. Billboard reached out to nearly 20 high-profile Sanders backers in the music world asking to talk about whether they'd shift support to Biden and received quick declines or no response.

Generally speaking, artists lean progressive, and many say they can't stomach the thought of a centrist, especially one with #MeToo issues, in the Oval Office. Strange Ranger, a Philadelphia indie-rock band, released a 20-track, multi-artist compilation to raise money for Sanders' campaign in January and plan a follow-up, but will change the beneficiary to the social-justice group Groundswell Fund rather than the presumptive Democratic nominee. Drummer Nathan Tucker and singer Isaac Eiger don't plan to campaign or fundraise for Biden and will support progressive down-ballot candidates instead. "I'm going to hold my nose and vote for Biden, but I'm not inspired by Joe Biden," Eiger says. "I don't know who is."

"People are always saying to pick the lesser of two evils, or whatever, but it's pretty disappointing to have to choose evil at all," adds Linnea Siggelkow, the Canadian pop singer and Sanders supporter who goes by Ellis. "So I have my hands up at this point."

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders for the presidential nomination, artists handled these conflicts in different ways. Sanders backer Miley Cyrus became an enthusiastic Clinton supporter, while Killer Mike said supporting Trump or Clinton came down to "voting for the same thing." Cardi B took the Cyrus road after Sanders dropped out this year: “I’m just gonna go with Joe Biden because I cannot see the next step of America being ran by number 45,” she said.

"It's just a no-brainer," adds Melissa Etheridge, who backed Sen. Elizabeth Warren but appeared at a virtual fundraiser for Biden in April. "We can bring on change. It'll just be a little slower with Biden, but at least it will be leadership, for heaven's sakes." Actor-singer Billy Porter is more blunt: "Biden is my candidate because there is no other candidate, period," he says. "We must play the game we're in, and the game we're in is there's a monster in the White House who needs to get out and every one of his cronies needs to get out. Period. Y'all took your toys and went home when Bernie wasn't the candidate last time and that's why we lost. Line up and fix it!"

Complicating artists' 2020 political plans, whether they support Biden or down-ballot candidates or causes, is an inability to hold large public rallies due to COVID-19 lockdowns. It's unlikely, for example, that Bruce Springsteen will draw 11th-hour supporters in Pennsylvania or Beyoncé and Jay-Z will fill stadiums in Ohio in November. How will they adapt? By moving online, of course.

..."Online efforts are extremely scalable," says Carolyn DeWitt, president of Rock the Vote, which is known for its festival voter-registration efforts but has pivoted to lower-overhead virtual organizing over the years. "Setting up a table at a concert, you are bound to get a handful of individuals to register to vote. Online, you can use influencers to reach millions."

That's not to say voter registration is pandemic-proof. When concerts shut down March 12, PLUS1, which supports nonprofits and social-justice groups and focuses in part on voter registration, lost nearly $2 million in 1.7 million of canceled ticket sales; the group quickly launched a COVID-19 relief fund that has raised $250,000 for artists, venues and other music entities. "Financially, right now, we haven't reserved any of that for our partner organizations that do voter registration," says Marika Shaw, the group's founder and CEO. "And it sucks."

But even without Sanders in the race and large rallies questionable for the rest of this year, artist-focused political groups remain confident they can boost voter education through online efforts. "There's a part of me that's skeptical, but the other half is, 'Instead of being at this show and having to text this number with a beer in your hand, you'll go to this website and fill in this form,'" adds Kyle Frenette, former manager of Sanders supporter Bon Iver, who founded a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote group called 46 for 46. "The results could be surprising. People are at home and looking for things to watch. It's not limited to that time and place."

Recently former Onion editor, Joe Garden, put together a piece for Vice: Area Man Regrets Helping Turn Joe Biden Into a Meme "If you’ve ever thought of Joe Biden as a clueless but lovable clod, a well-meaning klutz who is predictable, friendly, and ultimately electable," wrote Garden, "I am in small part responsible for that image. And I’m sorry. I worked at The Onion for 19 years as a writer and features editor. By the time I left in 2012, the publication had developed its take on Vice President Biden: 'creepy but harmless,' with the emphasis on 'harmless.' We lampooned him as an uncle you’d shake your head at but not think twice about-- the sort of guy who’d wink and say, 'Don’t let your meat loaf!' as a farewell. For many people, the image of Biden that most readily springs to mind is the one of Diamond Joe, shirtless and grinning, washing his Trans Am in the White House driveway."

Garden thought of Biden as "little more than a political necessity: the older, more conservative white guy who softened Barack Obama’s image in regions where the prospect of a black president was too radical. A deeper dive on Biden never felt necessary." He's changed his mind and wrote that he now realizes "how badly we screwed up. Instead of viciously skewering a public figure who deserved scrutiny, we let him off easy. The joke was funny, but it didn’t hit hard enough."

I’ve since changed my mind. Today, Biden is the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, despite women calling him out for touching them in ways that made them uncomfortable at public events, and despite objections from the left wing of the party. He has said he has “no empathy” for the problems millennials are experiencing and claimed that Republicans will embrace bipartisanship after Trump is defeated.

...To be clear, Biden won’t wind up in the same layer of hell as Trump, and I don’t believe The Onion’s Biden is solely responsible for this early popularity of real-life Biden. We were just one small link in a chain of institutions that didn’t scrutinize Biden closely enough. I wish we had looked more at his actual career in politics-- which includes opposition to busing as a way to integrate schools and support for predatory financial institutions-- and tried to really puncture him, rather than just turning him into a clown. We helped make him more likable by inventing a version of Biden that never existed.

I still think those Onion articles are funny. The Onion’s approach to covering public figures was to establish consistent, world-building takes that rewarded the reader, and our Biden was an endlessly refillable character with good visuals, one that made us laugh. It still makes me laugh.

But I’m afraid it didn’t go deep enough. His aforementioned handsiness may not be ultimately disqualifying, but his failure to honestly understand why it would be upsetting (he’s joked about it in public) certainly should be. And his insistence that we can rectify our current political discord with some good old-fashioned bipartisan dealmaking seems hopelessly out of touch and ignores all the times Democrats reached their hands across the aisle, only to be met with open flame from the right.

Satire isn’t dead, and it shouldn’t be cast aside. It will always have a place in the social order, and that is to tell the truth by constructing a fiction, to amplify society’s negative traits to a comical extent so you can see the ugliness that’s always been there.

On that score, The Onion’s Biden stories didn’t measure up. We knew through inside sources that at the time people in the White House loved those pieces, and that should have been a red flag. As a guideline, if the people you’re satirizing aren’t mad, then you should dig deeper. I hope that my alma mater, and everyone else in comedy, follows this rule now that Diamond Joe is back.

ClimateBrad observed yesterday that the Biden campaign likes the approach The Onion took on their pile of dogshit so much, that they're using that version to try to win over the electorate! Michael Scherer and Sean Sullivan wrote that "While the Trump campaign online has embraced a macho and combative approach-- 'This account punches back 10x harder,' runs the motto of one campaign Twitter account-- the Biden team has been seeking to develop a more uplifting identity online, embracing the candidate's life story and making light of his love of ice cream and aviator sunglasses. 'Trump's angles on social media are always dark, and they are always mean-spirited,' said Ben Cobley, a Biden digital organizer. He said Biden wanted to build a community around the more positive side of social media, populated by inspiring memes and cat videos. 'We want to lean into that side of the Internet because that side also plays very well.'" They might want to try to figure out why Democratic enthusiasm for their candidate is lagging so badly.