I'm settling in here for the night, and during this dinnertime (on the East Coast) lull, before we start to get a bunch of results coming in, I've been thinking about what a strange campaign this has been. Back in the winter, during the primaries, there was a point in time when a lot of people didn’t think Biden was even going to be the Democratic nominee! (And while we’re being nostalgic, remember the Iowa caucuses??) And the pandemic has changed the contours of the race more than anyone could have imagined.
A Trump vs. Biden campaign was always going to be different than 2016’s Trump vs. Clinton: Sexism hasn't been talked about a ton during this race, despite the fact that the Democrats have a woman vice presidential nominee; Trump is now president, and it’s more difficult to run as an outsider/disrupter when you’re in the highest echelons of power. I think the Trump campaign had planned to run more on the economy and had planned to focus more on Hunter Biden and charges of nepotism. COVID-19 changed a lot of that. The economy is no longer in the optimistic place it was, and 230,000 Americans have died during this pandemic, which means even if voters don’t like the perception of nepotistic tendencies in the Biden family, they might not care as much about that storyline now.
The very nature of the way we vote has become the biggest storyline of this election. It’s very meta, but also very fundamental to democracy. Anyhow, this is just my way of saying: This is not the campaign I thought I’d be covering. But here we are. Onward.