The 2020 presidential election is in high gear; some 16 months before voters cast their ballots, the campaign already promises to be intense and bitter to a degree perhaps unprecedented.
A measure of this is that President Trump’s supporters began lining up to get into his campaign launch rally in Tampa, Fla., 40 hours before it was scheduled to begin. They camped out on the streets during a monsoon! There were more than 100,000 applications for seats in an auditorium with a maximum capacity of 20,000. People drove from as far away as Boston to be there. Intense!
But intensity of support is matched by fervor of opposition. Members of the #Resistance are not getting less passionate in their fury and disdain for Trump as time goes by. The Left’s primal scream on Inauguration Day is no distant echo, but endlessly repeated. It volleys around arguments for his impeachment, and ignores the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller, to insist that Trump stole the 2016 election in league with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and is an illegitimate president.
Traditional measures, polls, suggest Trump is eminently beatable. He trails Democratic front-runner Joe Biden by wide margins in battleground states, and about half of respondents in respectable polls say they would never vote for him or are very unlikely to vote for him. Polls don’t tell the whole story — it was certain, wasn’t it, that Trump was going to lose in 2016? — and it seems likely that there is a hidden Trump vote this time around, as there was before. Both sides believe they have everything to fight for.
So here we are. As we enter more than a year of bitter, ugly electioneering, Democrats believe the incumbent is uniquely vulnerable and that the Left’s nominee will have an excellent chance of winning the White House. So, upwards of 20 Democratic contenders are trying to seize the prize.
The prize is so great that they are not letting scruples get in the way of tactical advantage. Which brings us to this week’s cover story about the revived fortunes of an amoral, race-baiting huckster, Al Sharpton. He should have been dismissed from self-respecting political circles at least three decades ago, but is back with a vengeance as a 2020 power broker. Democratic wannabes are lining up to kiss the ring of this preacher without pulpit, fearing that he could turn black voters against them if they don’t show sufficient deference. It’s an unedifying spectacle only to be looked on by the strong of stomach. Seth Mandel lays bare the hypocrisy and calculation of it all in his feature “Return of the Kingmaker.”
Elsewhere in the magazine, Nic Rowan profiles another Democratic hopeful, John Hickenlooper, and Stephen Gutowski probes the astonishing internecine fight raging inside the National Rifle Association. Eric Felten uses Downtime to lampoon silly elaborate names given to cocktails, and Jay Caruso laments the lack of silly, if pithy, nicknames given to today’s baseball players. Alexander Khan celebrates “Deadwood,” the movie, and Jamie Dettmer ponders the panders of Roman politics.
