It feels like Harris has to run a damn near flawless campaign just to BARELY beat this guy. Yeah you can bring up the current state of the country, but Trump mishandled COVID, there were over 200k deaths, BLM protest and was 2x impeached. And yet, Joe Biden BARELY beat him.
Trump is a convicted felon, liable sexual predator, caused an insurrection on the Capitol Hill, tried to steal the 2020 election (find me 11,000 votes), constantly kisses Russia’s ass, has more pending court cases and gets sentenced next month and overall has been the main driving factor in America’s division.
Yet, this race is STILL either 50/50 or a slight tilt (Harris leads the polling aggregate right now). Harris gets destroyed by the corporate media for almost anything, yet Trump is still lying and saying the most outlandish shit and nobody cares.
Why does it feel standards are much higher for Harris than Trump?
It’s because democrats are unwilling or unable to deliver on real policies for working people. Of course, republicans are the same, but they more or less don’t even pretend to, choosing instead to whip up their constituents with culture war nonsense. Nobody has any faith in things improving. Repubs just want to get revenge on their cultural enemies, and democrats (voters) just want to prevent a total slide toward the far right.
Dem politicians can’t whip up excitement because it is impossible to get people excited by neoliberal policies, but that’s really all they have. Vague platitudes only work so many election cycles in a row before voters just can’t even pretend to be excited anymore.
tl:dr republicans are awful but at least their base believes in them.
Their base believes in them simply due to decades of propaganda and brainwashing coming from AM radio first and then normalized on fox “news”
I’m sure if democrats were lied to about nearly everything and were told republicans were immoral enemies that are the cause of all your problems for decades just like conservatives have done, they’d have more belief in the democrat party.
It doesn’t matter why the republican base believes in their party. Incidentally, you’re not entirely wrong about why, but they’ve had rebellion too: see the TEA party.
The democrat party strategy is different. Their base isn’t aggrieved axe-grinders. They’re earnest believers in the system. The problem is that the leadership doesn’t actually want to accomplish anything that would threaten corporate profits. Trump is great for them, since all they have to do is not be him! Policies be damned.