The Democratic Party nominated Joe Biden as a Presidential candidate and Kamala Harris as a Vice Presidential candidate in their virtual convention. The Republicans re-nominated Donald Trump in the White House. In 2020, we lived in an unprecedented pandemic and soon decide who will lead the post-COVID-19 era. During Trump’s campaign, he exaggerates his economy to make crowds with his plea to return to normalcy. Furthermore, Trump’s allies from the right continue to exacerbate conspiracy theories about the Biden family and the election (Alter, 2020).
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything from how the campaign is conducted to value who we vote for. It has canceled conventions and relegated and altered its movement into a digital realm. The Biden faction has transformed its campaign into an online format (Alter, 2020). Trump had hoped to keep up rallies central to political mythology. Still, he is settled for online-release rallies after a significant failure to gather supporters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. According to CNN reporter Dana Bash, conversations with voters are the most effective way to turnout. However, the Biden campaign is not planning on door knocking, as it is too risky for workers due to COVID-19. However, it seems that many voters are excited to cast their ballots. According to a Fox News poll, 85% said they were highly motivated to vote, up by 10% from 2016 (Kirk, 2020).
The pandemic has intensified voters’ awareness of why their votes matter. CNN poll (2020) suggests that 40% approve of Trump’s performance; more than 50% disapprove. Voters now disapprove of Trump’s performance in handling the pandemic by a 20% margin. Biden is holding a significant lead in crucial battleground states like Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Trump leads popularity in social media, as he has seven times as many Twitter followers as Biden does and more than five times as much interaction on Facebook. He has spent a lot more than on Facebook advertisements over the past 30 days.
Many states are now preparing to cast their mail voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing people to vote without social interaction. Political experts are concerned that the COVID-19 will change the outcome of the election. Election night may conclude without a clear winner, and it could take a week or month to figure out the actual winner. The Incumbent President repeatedly argues on the vote’s legitimacy, saying that mail voting is not safe and that the election will be rigged.
According to Reuters (2020), the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has exacerbated a new solid element into the last stretch of the US presidential election. It potentially shifted attention from the COVID pandemic and the weakening economy onto a political battle over her successor. The vacancy on the nation’s high court signals the election has become a much more volatile battle between the incumbent president and Joe Biden for the White House and the control of Congress and the Senate. Now, the action will be desperate over civil rights, immigration, abortion, health care, etc. The death of Justice Ginsburg, an advocate for women’s rights and the court’s leading liberal voice, provides Trump with an opportunity to broaden its conservative majority with his third appointment at a time of deep divisive America just 50 days before the election. Trump signaled that he would move to nominate a successor without any delay. Joe Biden wants to postpone its appointment after the election. For Trump, it is likely to energize the evangelical and conservative base who oppose gay marriage and abortion, as well as a shift in the balance of power on the high court.
Charlotte Alter (2020) studied a conspiracy theory spreading across the country, and it has to do with a corrupt, evil, and dark belief hidden from the public. QAnon conspiracy began in 2017 and has spread widely over recent months, migrating from far-right corners of the internet among ordinary workers in a rural suburb. Several QAnon-friendly candidates have run for Congress, more than two have won for the Republican primaries. In Wisconsin, a vast majority of QAnon supporters believe the notion that COVID is a fraud. Furthermore, several QAnon supporters argued democrats were planning to bring troops before the election to prevent Trump from winning (Alter, 2020).
It is not easy to recognize precisely what people believe. Some had been exposed to the QAnon conspiracy theory online. Others seemed to be reiterating false ideas revealed in a pandemic. A couple of conspiracy videos featuring humiliated former medical researchers went viral spread the notion COVID-19 is a fraud across social media (Alter, 2020). American politics has constantly been exposed to conspiracy theories. The historian Richard Hofstadter told populists in the 1890s warned that secret cables were controlling the price of gold. In 2008, there was a false rumor that President Obama was not born in the US, and Obama was a foreign-born of Muslims running for a third term. Most recently, rumor has it that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster killed. According to the Pew Research Centre (2020), 25% of Americans say there is some truth to the conspiracy theory that China’s COVID-19 pandemic was internationally planned. More than half of Republicans believed some areas of QAnon were true.
The rise of conspiracy thinking is the product of several interrelated trends, declining trust in institutions, the expiration of local news. This social media environment makes rumors easy to spread and difficult to debunk. On the left, conspiracy theories often weaken voters’ allegiance to Biden by making them less likely to trust the voting process. Trump has falsely claimed that mailing ballots lead to massive corruption and fraud on televisions, rallies, and Twitter. That foreign powers will forge ballots, and the only way to lose the election is as if the election is rigged. Gallup found last year that 59% of Americans were not confident in the honesty of elections. Seventy-four percent of those opposed to the US leadership reported a lack of confidence in the openness of the American election.
Trump’s fear-mongering about the need to fight voter fraud has given new life to a decades-old tactic, such as voter-roll purges and stringent voter-ID laws. 2016 was the fake news election, but 2020 makes it look like nothing according to Samuel Wooley, project director for propaganda research at the Centre for media engagement at the University of Texas. He argues that this infrastructure that has been scaled up since politicians started to discover social media has now become controlled down to the state level the city level under Donald Trump. It is the democratization of propaganda. Republican candidates have adopted Trump’s idea. “Election fraud should concern every voter in this country,” wrote Margaret Streicker, a Republican running in Connecticut’s Third Congressional District, in a post shared more than 100 times on Facebook.
Targeted fake news campaigns were effective in 2016. According to a Monmouth University poll, more than 35% of registered voters say they are not confident the election will be fair. Republicans say the problem is voter fraud. On the other hand, Democrats say it is voter oppression. They added, “If the perception is there, then people believe it’s a fraudulent election.”
According to the NBC poll, just more than 11% of Trump supporters said they planned to vote in the mail than 47% of supporters of democratic nominee Biden. As of September 22nd, 2020, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump in the national polls for the presidential election. However, that does not guarantee the victory for Joe Biden. Hillary Clinton also had a majority lead over Donald Trump in the polls for the 2016 campaign. In the end, she lost in the Electoral College. The presidential voting system assigns each state several Electoral College votes, which go to a victor regardless of the state margin of victory; a handful of swing states such as Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania will probably decide the election focused heavily by candidates.
On September 20th, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll from Minnesota shows Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with a 57% to 41% lead over incumbent president Donald Trump among likely voters. As of September 21st, if we look at the polling right now, there is a pretty clear picture: Biden has a significant lead of somewhere between five and eight points in several states Trump won four years ago, such as Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and those seats Hillary Clinton won. It will take Biden about 290 electoral votes. That is not quite a landslide; look at the polling in places like Iowa, Georgia, and Texas, which used to be safe Republican seats, even though one or both campaigns have fairly significant advertising investments planned down the stretch in all four. The polling there has been relatively consistent. Biden is quite competitive. Indeed, he may be up in either Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, or Texas, and we do not know whether there is not enough new data. For example, Clinton lost in Georgia 5% in 2016, and Beto O’Rourke received 48% over Republican opponent Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm election. Biden’s doing about five points better in the national polls than she did in the final vote. It would make sense, therefore, that Biden’s quite close to Trump there at this point.
We need to keep in mind is that each poll has its margin of error. That is precisely what happened in 2016 when Trump won most of the close states. However, we are going through an era of COVID. In January 2020, as the coronavirus outbreak began, the White House formed a task force that included Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy, and Deborah Birx, the Coordinator of the US Government Activities to combat HIV/AIDS. In February, the US began travel restrictions to contain the outbreak, which included temporarily denying entry from China in the 14 before they arrived in the US. Trump has been heavily criticized, as he continued to downplay the need for increased testing and social distancing.
Furthermore, public health officials in Trump’s administration urged Americans to social distancing and wear masks to slow the spread of the virus. Still, Trump himself has been reluctant to wear a mask in public. As a result, as of September 22nd, the number of deaths from COVID-19 increased up to 200,000. That is the most significant number of deaths from COVID-19 in the world.
Biden wants to offer free testing to all Americans. He calls for hiring 100,000 people to conduct a national contact tracing, increase drive-thru testing sites. He also urges Trump to use the Defense Production Act to provide protective equipment for health care workers. Biden and Harris designed steps to help businesses and schools reopen, including financial support for retaining and rehiring workers and guaranteeing paid leave for anyone with coronavirus or caring for someone with the virus. Biden mentioned he would make everyone wear a mask in public.
This research successfully showed a strategy for Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which takes them to the presidency in November 2020. However, this research was conducted during the election campaign, which means a future polling result and outcome of the election may differ from my study conducted around late September.
According to Bill Frey from Brookings Institution, “America is moving from white, baby-boomer controlled culture and politics from the 1970s to a more racially diverse country fulfilled by younger generations, such millennials, Gen z-ers and their juniors.” Boomers had controlled politics since the 1990s when they became the largest living generation and started to cast the most significant votes since the 1992 Presidential election. Six of the eight presidents have been baby boomers. However, boomers lost their status as the largest generation in 2019. There were 500,000 more millennials or younger. Younger generations show a difference between their elders in attitudes, ethnicity, and education. Millennials and Gen Z-ers are highly expected to say that governments should take more actions to provide solutions for problems. The millennials claim that same-sex marriage is beneficial for the community, that climate change results from human activity, and that blacks are treated less fairly than whites. They are also more likely to say impediments should be put on capitalism. They are also more likely to belong to minorities. As a general rule, the younger you are, the more likely you will be black, Hispanic, or Asian. In Texas, 44% of voters are Hispanic or black. In eight states, including Georgia or Florida, over 40% of voters are non-white. These are places where Democrats have a chance of getting a victory for the first time in many decades. They are the people most likely to be galvanized by the killing of George Floyd and others. Those born after the 1990s are more educated than their parents. About 25% of baby boomers had a college degree or higher. For millennials, the share was about 40%.
According to a recent poll from “the boomer’s last stand,” more than 43% of millennial women have degrees, which is seven points higher than males who do. The Republicans’ disastrous performance in 2018 in suburban counties, former strongholds, owes much to the hatred felt by college-educated millennial women for Trump. African Americans vote for Democrats by ten to one or more; Hispanics and Asians by about two to one; 53% of college graduates are known as Democrats and only 40% with Republicans. From the article “boomers last stand,” Democrats are understandably optimistic about Joe Biden’s opinion-poll lead. However, 2016 showed that leads could plummet, and the bizarre Electoral College can let a candidate lose the popular vote but still win the election like what we had seen in 2000 and 2016. With that said, from a generational perspective, it is clear that the Democrats should be ahead. It highlights not only Mr. Trump’s personality and record but shifts in the tectonic plates of electoral demography (Economist, 2020).
