What an odd couple of presidential elections we’ll be looking back on when we look at 2016 and this upcoming 2020 election. In 2016, we had a contest between (from the outside) 2 of the most disliked candidates in all of history; that’s the common refrain anyway, and when you think about it, the dislike was always coming from the opposing party. Yes, I realize there are “Never Trumpers” in the Republic party, but I can basically guarantee that none of them (or few enough to be negligible) actually voted for Candidate Clinton. As such, all you’re seeing is the majority of the Democratic party voting against Trump, and then majority of the Republican party voting against Clinton.
Well, we all know how that played out now: Hillary won the popular vote and Donald won the Electoral College.
At the end of the day, while I largely disagree with the efficacy of the Electoral College in today’s day and age, that’s irrelevant to what I’m writing about.
What we have no is another oddball potential election cycle. At this point, all candidates for the Democratic nomination have dropped out of the primary race, leaving us with Joe Biden. While it was, for a little while, still possible that some of the other candidates could still receive votes as many have simply suspended their campaigns and not dissolved them entirely, it’s becoming even less likely. Just recently, it happened that New York State, my home state, has cancelled the New York Presidential Primary…so there’s Bernie’s chances in NYS. That said, the Democratic National Convention still awaits, and who the hell knows what will end up happening there.
The reason I say this is simply because of the fallibility of Joe Biden. For all appearances, I like Joe, he seems like a nice guy, and if the presidency was based entirely on that, then he’d win in spades…simply because Trump by all appearances is the polar opposite. But that isn’t the case, especially now with the emergence of sexual assault allegations against Biden. From the last I had read, there are 7 women that have come forward with accusations of sexual assault of varying degrees against Biden. Even if we assume that some of these accusations are falsehoods or exaggerations, there’s still the current estimates of only 2-6% of accusations being false (Here’s the truth about false accusations of sexual violence). This puts us in an interesting place, simply because that means less than 1 of these accusations could potentially be false.
That’s the Democratic side of the equation. When you look at Trump, you have an even greater number of credible accusations.
So now, we’re looking at an election where both candidates have serious, and credible, accusation of sexual misconduct and potentially sexual assault. How the hell can we, the American people, be in a position where those are our options?
This will always be the most frustrating aspect of the American Presidential electoral system to me – the 2-party system. By most descriptions, the US doesn’t operate with only 2 parties, but at the end of the day, you’re largely looking at only 2 groups: Republicans and Democrats.
Anyway, I don’t really have a direction I’m taking this, mainly because I know I probably won’t vote for either of the major party candidates. That means I’m going to have to be paying attention to the election cycle and see which 3rd party candidates start showing up for the party.
Idle Ramblings 