Andrew Sullivan is dreaming of a Creepy Joe landslide:
I know it’s tempting fate to mention the idea, foolish to entertain it, mad to expect it, but the possibility of a landslide is now real. There are about ten points between the two candidates with three weeks to go, and the momentum is overwhelmingly with the challenger. Among the likeliest scenarios in 538’s poll of polls is now a Biden Electoral College victory of over 400. Texas is in play. The Harris-Pence debate changed nothing, but firmly established Harris’ credentials as a possible president.
And all this changes a huge amount. A Biden win would be a reprieve for the country; a Biden landslide would be an American miracle.
Unlike anything else, it would cauterize the wound of Trump, preventing further infection. It would say to posterity: we made this hideous mistake, for understandable reasons, but after four years, we saw what we did and decisively changed course. It would turn the Trump era of nihilism, tribalism and cruelty into a cautionary tale of extremism, illiberalism and, above all, failure. It would suggest, especially if older whites come round some more, that the future need not be one of spiraling racial polarization, but of multiracial support for liberal democracy, its norms, and practices. What you learn from studying the decline and collapse of republics is that illiberal precedents become the new baseline if they are not instantly repudiated and punished. A landslide loss for Trump would mitigate, if not remove, the deep damage he has done.
It’s really astonishing to observe the lengths that people will go to deny reality. And I’m not talking about the election results: who can be expected to accurately predict anything on the basis of the folded, spindled, and mutilated polls? I’m talking about the idea that the spiraling racial polarization is the result of Trump’s presidency or the failure of older whites to support liberal democracy.
It is, to the contrary, the inevitable result of the 1965 Immigration Act and subsequent demographic dilution of the American nation. Since Sullivan is an immigrant himself, though, he is psychologically unable to even entertain the possibility that what made his preferred life possible is the cause of the problem he decries.
But Sullivan isn’t the only one. 538 currently assesses the chances of a Biden landslide at 36 percent, with an 86 percent chance of winning the electoral vote. Of course, at this time in 2016, 538 assessed Hillary Clinton’s chance of winning the Electoral College at 86.9 percent.