THE HUTCHINSON REPORT
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
On Sept. 12, 2016, I wrote in a detailed email to a friend that “Trump may win.” Few others said or believed that then.
I ticked off a series of reasons why the impossible might just be possible with Trump. Those reasons are listed below.
Nearly four years later the word again is the polls showing former Vice President Joe Biden running away with the race mean nothing. Remember Hillary Clinton and 2016. The polls showed her with a big lead.
Almost no one, and that included much of the Republican establishment, most Democrats, most of the media, the polls, and privately, many in Trump’s camp, gave him a realistic shot at the Oval Office.
He was the near textbook hyper misogynist, race and immigrant baiter, was odious to Republican Party regulars and lagged behind Clinton in most polls. Clinton, by contrast, was the consummate Democratic Party insider, had tons of campaign cash and the Democratic party establishment behind her. There was the supposed magic of the Clinton name. We know the rest.
So, it’s against this backdrop that more than a few think 2020 may well play out the same way, with Trump edging Biden at the finish line. That won’t happen for the exact opposite reasons Trump stunned nearly everyone in 2016.
Trump then was the consummate outsider, a brash, loud-mouth businessman, who held no political office. This was not a built-in handicap. This was a colossal plus with millions of voters who railed, grumbled and were enraged at the real and perceived endemic Beltway political favoritism, cronyism, corporate and political insider deal making and secrecy.
The perceived victims of this thumb the nose by lawmakers were white, less educated, Joe and Jane Blue collar worker and rural voter. Trump was their answer.
There was the deep anguish over the flight of industrial and manufacturing jobs to the far limits of the Earth. That left whole swatches of Middle America looking like a second 1930s Dust Bowl. Many voters in the heartland states screamed loud to bring those jobs back.
They longed for an outsider, a proverbial man on the white horse, who would drain the political putrescent swamp. Trump was their answer.
Then there was Hillary. The Clinton fatigue, the X factor of being a woman, when many women said that the presidency was a man’s job, and her poll negatives ran neck and neck with Trump’s. That hurt her.
The lukewarm to cool perception among African-American voters toward her, many of whom stayed home on Election Day, hurt even more.
There is always the ugly sewer of racism, nativist know nothingism, gender misogyny, frontier crudity, that courses just beneath the surface in America. Millions swim in that current. The election of Obama brought that stench rising to the surface. They were repelled by him, his administration and the very thought of an African-American president. Trump was their answer.
Four years later, that’s changed. He’s not the ultimate outlier for many who will sweep things clean. He’s President Trump, not candidate Trump. He’s not the unknown factor that frustrated and disgusted voters were willing to roll the dice and take a chance on then. He’s a very known quantity, the political insider who fills up every news cycle, and a man who many have had four years to take the measure of. And they do not like what they see.
For much of his four years, Trump had one major task: get back to the White House. There was a robust, humming economy and lots of jobs. He could falsely claim full credit for supposedly ushering the good times in.
The COVID debacle ended that, but that isn’t all its done. It has made lots of voters steamed that their president ducked, dodged, diddled and denied the danger and threat. This cost lots of lives and put thousands at unnecessary risk.
Despite all his lies, finger pointing and denials, Trump is still the man at the wheel and he still deservedly gets the heat for bungling the crisis and putting lives at risk.
Biden, for his part, is not Clinton. He has none of her negatives, and consistently scores high on the favorability scale. He has far exceeded the polling numbers Clinton had in the swing states. The polls this go around carefully measure “likely voters,” not simply eligible voters.
Trump’s biggest ace card in 2016, though, was the race and immigration card that he played hard, ruthlessly, and sadly, successfully. He made clear that that card would be his way back to the Oval Office. He’s played it repeatedly at his rallies, in endless tweets, bellicose diatribes in Fox Network interviews and by embracing kooky, far out, murky racist groups and conspiracy theories. However, this is a worn-out act that’s been seen and heard so much that apart from his rabid base, it is a turn off for many voters.
Biden is every bit the household name and the establishment politician that Clinton was. But he has none of her baggage. Trump is very much the household name he was in 2016 but with tons more baggage than he had even then. That’s why Election Day 2020 won’t be a repeat of that shocking day in 2016.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of “What’s Right and Wrong with the Electoral College” (Middle Passage Press). He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
