linnposts.com

You’re not helping.

You act like Joe Biden is down in national polls and behind in every battleground state when the opposite is the case.

Every day I get an email, see on FB post, or read some political analysis that says Trump is going to pull this election out of his magic hat like he did four years ago.

Comedian Bill Maher says he is getting the same feeling he had four years ago, as if what Bill Maher feels or thinks matters. Then there is MSNBC Pundit John Heileman who has said on at least two occasions that Democrats are “freaking out” because Biden isn’t taking Trump on as directly as they (and Heilman) think he should.

Even the Biden campaign has adopted the strategy that he is losing ground to Trump in an effort to raise money.

How stupid is that? Don’t they know that nobody bets on a losing horse?

Adding to this chorus of doomsday warnings in recent days is none other than Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eugene Robinson. I like Robinson a lot, so his Washington Post column has made me really start worrying, not that Biden might lose, but the fact that Democrats seem determined not to believe Biden is going to win.

After listing everything that could go wrong that would lead to a Trump victory, Robinson does manage to say: “But Biden and the Democrats — with enthusiasm, hard work and a bit of healthy paranoia — can capitalize on a big advantage: Objective reality is on their side.”

Sounds good except “healthy paranoia” is an oxymoron. There is no such thing as “healthy paranoia,” and recommending willful “paranoia” strikes me as ridiculous advice for a political campaign that has been doing quite well thus far.

What is most troubling about Robinson’s warning to Democrats is that he begins with the observation: ‘Coming out of the conventions, the Trump campaign is trying its best to create the illusion of momentum.”

They certainly are, and Robinson, Maher, the DNC, and apparently 51% of all voters are lending him a helping hand.

That’s right, 51%, according to CNN’s Harry Enten, despite Biden’s post-convention lead nationally and in battleground states being essentially where they were two weeks ago, a slim majority of voters still believe Trump is going to win

His analysis is one I share. This hand-wringing makes no sense, attributable more to 2016 political PTSD than to actual facts ((https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/30/politics/trump-polling-analysis/index.html).

Every political pundit on the planet has been saying that once the race gets underway for real, the polls would tighten.

Now that they have – barely – these same pundits are like Chicken Little running around yelling, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling,” and too many Biden voters are running with them.

I’m a nobody and have no influence, but if I did I would tell the worried Biden voters to stop, take a breath, and look at what they are doing that is helping to create the very scenario they say they are worried about.

Then I would ask them to listen very carefully to what I am about to say because it is something that could not have been said until now – THIS IS NOT 2016.

It’s actually 2020, but apparently they don’t know that.

Here’s some other news. Hillary Clinton is not running again and neither is the 2016 Donald Trump.

Joe Biden is the Democratic candidate for president this year, and the Donald Trump who ran four years ago is not the one running now because the one this year has a four-year track record proving he is not up to the job of being President of the United States.

This record is so bad he himself knows he cannot defend it so he doesn’t talk about it. Instead, he is promoting the old Nixon “law and order” strategy, promoting conspiracy theories, and now advocating his supporters break the law, as the law and order candidate no less.

He is saying all these things because he knows he is losing, something too many Biden voters don’t really believe deep down.

What is a complete enigma to me is why anyone believes taking the legs out from under the momentum Biden had coming out of a great Democratic convention seems like an effective strategy.

E.J. Dionne, another Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, finds this as troubling as I do. “Now, as a general rule,” he writes, “warnings against complacency are a good idea…But hand-wringing about Trump’s imagined political genius is counterproductive. It feeds the illusion on which Trump has built his entire career: that he is strong, tough and canny. In fact, he is weak, vacillating and, when it comes to running the country, clueless.”

He goes on to say, “Seemingly sober commentary about how ‘effective’ Trump’s attacks are plays down a core truth: He lies, and lies, and lies again. As the Post’s Fact Checker noted, Trump’s convention speech was ‘a tidal wave of tall tales, false claims and revisionist history.’ To avoid a replay of the false-equivalence journalism of 2016, this fact, not tactical musings, must remain at the heart of the story.”

You wonder why Biden voters don’t see what Dionne is saying, but, of course, we already know why – their 2016 hangover.

It makes no sense. Factors working against Hillary Clinton are not working against Joe Biden, not least that people like him a lot more than they liked her.

Neither are factors that helped Trump back then helping him now, not least that after four years people not only don’t like him, they despise him.

And here’s the kicker. Democrats are in no danger of overconfidence. We know anything can happen between now and November 3rd. We don’t need to be motivated to vote. Complacency is not a problem. We were motivated in the 2018 mid-terms, the 2020 primaries, and are for the 2020 election.

Perhaps “Kos” of Daily Kos said it best. In a recent column he provides ample statistical support for Biden’s lead being solid and legitimate, and then he bluntly addresses the worry Biden voters seem to have that his supporters are going to take their foot off the pedal.

“But really, is anyone going to do that? We didn’t in 2018, despite all the great signs of impending victory. Heck, the sweet taste of big success is a motivator. So none of that silly “act like we’re 10 points down!” crap. That shit demotivates. No one likes to be losing.”

Exactly. No one likes to be losing. Nobody bets on a losing horse.

So, if I had a real voice and could speak and Biden voters would listen, here would be my message:

Don’t be afraid to believe we are going to win. The numbers are on our side. There are more of us than there are of them. That was true in 2016. It was true in 2018. It is true today. We not only have Democrats and independents with us. We have thousands of former Republicans who hate what Trump has done to their party. So forget about 2016. This is 2020, the year you really can believe we are going to win because we are!