Pinkerton: Ten Things that Will Happen in a Biden Presidency

The Marketing Imagination and the Political Imagination

According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Joe Biden is about ten points ahead of Donald Trump.

Moreover, the planned “reset” of Trump’s reelection campaign in Tulsa on June 20 was not a success, at least in terms of its expectations-game optics; the Trump fans were enthusiastic, but there were only 6,200 of them—a fraction of the number that the campaign itself had anticipated. Was the soft attendance the result of Democrat dirty tricks? Or of threatened mob violence? Perhaps there was some of that, but the plain fact is that the Trump campaign had trouble building a crowd in a state that Trump carried by by more 36 points four years ago. Other events, elsewhere in the last few days, we might note, have gone much better, expectations-game management-wise.

Meanwhile, in just three-and-a-half months, Americans will start voting, thanks to absentee voting and vote-by- mail. Thus the Trump campaign must necessarily enter a new and sharper phase, in which it runs more effectively against what it calls the “defined Joe Biden”—that is, Biden revealed as something other than “Middle Class Joe.”

Yet if the Trump campaign is to succeed in “defining” Biden, as a menace, it won’t be sufficient to argue that Biden is “Sleepy Joe,” or that he has adopted new, more liberal, stances during his 2020 run for the White House. Those might both be true statements, but they aren’t enough. The plain fact is, “Joe Biden isn’t scaring the president’s base.” Those wordscome from the Washington Post’s David Weigel, who is not one of those PC journalistic wokesters, and who was on hand at the rally in Tulsa. He further recorded that anti-Biden sentiments were not strongly voiced among the crowd, and that “anti-Biden merchandise was not flying off the table.” Yes, Weigel acknowledged, many Trump supporters think that Biden has lost a step or two—or three—mentally, but that’s not the same thing as seeing him as some sort of Hillary Clinton-type ogre.

So we can see: If the Trump campaign just runs against Biden, sitting in his basement in Delaware—which is, shrewd Democrats say, the best place for him to be—that’s not likely to be sufficient to overcome the ominous public opinion trend-lines on Trump’s handling of, most notably, the coronavirus.

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