The plague election
IN THE 2020 THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, NOBODY IS SICK AND POLITICS is the center of the universe.
The Democratic Party has just nominated Joe Biden and his running mate at its mid-July convention in Milwaukee, while Republicans are gearing up to renominate Donald Trump in Charlotte, N.C. At his usual rallies, Trump is pointing to the roaring economy to make his case for re-election, while Biden struggles to stir up crowds with his plea for a return to normalcy. Trump’s allies continue to promote conspiracy theories about the Biden family’s entanglements in Ukraine, leading increasingly desperate Democrats to push for a second impeachment in the House. Both parties are campaigning furiously across the country, knocking on millions of doors to turn out voters in November.
But in the 2020 that’s actually happening, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything—from how the campaign is conducted to how we vote to what we value. It has canceled conventions, relegated fundraising and campaigning to the digital realm, and forced many states to rapidly change how people get and submit their ballots, with unpredictable and potentially disastrous results. The acute crises have refocused the nation’s attention, bringing issues like public health and economic and racial inequality to the fore and prompting the public to revisit what characteristics it wants in its leaders.
For four years, Trump has been the dominant force and inescapable fact not only of national politics but also of American life. Now he finds himself displaced as the central character in his own campaign by a plague that answers to no calendar, ideology or political objective. Just as the virus has changed the way adults report to offices and children go to school, upending whole industries in the process, it has spurred a massive shift in the fundamental act of American democracy: how we select the President who will be charged with ending the pandemic’s reign of destruction, dealing with its aftermath and shaping the nation that rises from its ashes. And as with so many other changes wrought by the coronavirus, the practice of American politics may never be quite the same again.
TRUMP FINDS HIMSELF DISPLACED AS THE CENTRAL CHARACTER IN HIS OWN CAMPAIGN
This was always going to be an unusual contest—the high-stakes re-election campaign of a historically divisive President at a pivotal moment for the nation, a referendum on his norm-shattering style and disruptive vision, a test for his scattered opposition to prove which side of a polarized political spectrum represents the mainstream. As the campaign enters its final three-month stretch, Trump trails badly in national and battleground-state polls as Americans give his dismal handling of
