This is worth reading for both sides...

US election: Trump closing gap on Biden, but is it too late?
Greg Sheridan

If Donald Trump pulls off a miraculous victory against all odds in defiance of almost every poll, and somehow or other scrapes across the line to be re-elected on November 3, Friday’s presidential debate will have been crucial.

Trump didn’t score a knockout blow, nor did Joe Biden put in a terrible performance. Both men performed well. But if Trump is to have any chance, the election will come down to a grinding war for half a dozen battleground states.

Crucially, Trump got Biden to admit he will abolish US oil.

Trump: “Would you close down the oil industry?”

Biden: “I would transition out of it, yes.”

Trump: “He’s saying he will destroy the oil industry. Remember that Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma.”

Trump said Biden had promised to end fracking but then changed when he came under pressure in Pennsylvania. Biden said he would not ban fracking, after all. But he is going to end fracking on federal land, end fossil fuel in energy generation by 2035 and make the US carbon neutral by 2050.

Trump probably cannot win the presidency unless he wins Pennsylvania and its 20 Electoral College votes. The fear that Biden will end fracking, end oil and cost thousands of Pennsylvania jobs gives Trump his best shot. But these considerations won’t matter if Biden wins big. If Trump isn’t close enough to be competitive, fracking and the oil industry won’t count.

A lot has been written, rightly, about cultural conflicts tearing the US apart. But some political hardheads believe that the economy, and the personal welfare of voters, is still more decisive.

That should be good news for Trump because Americans believe Trump would handle the economy better than Biden. A majority of Americans — 56 per cent — report that they are better off than they were four years ago.

But the biggest negative for Trump is his response to COVID-19. Coronavirus affects many directly, and scares the rest. Some 220,000 Americans have died of the virus. Infections are surging. In just one day, the US recorded more than 1100 virus deaths.

In truth, the US performance is comparable with Europe’s. And in Europe, countries that locked down heavily, such as Italy, still had huge death tolls. Countries that locked down late, such as Britain, had huge death tolls. And countries that didn’t lock down much at all, such as Sweden, also had huge death tolls. The virus doesn’t pay attention to our political debates. Like all plagues in history, its spread can be reduced by isolation.

We can treat the virus better now. Most young people who get it are not badly affected, but if enough young people are infected it moves inevitably into older, more vulnerable populations and kills a lot of people

If Trump loses, it will be because of his response to the virus. Biden had some of his strongest debate lines concerning COVID-19.

“He says we’ve got to learn to live with the virus,” Biden said of Trump. “Instead, people are learning to die with the virus.”

Biden’s rhetoric, blaming Trump directly for the dead, is patently unfair. But Trump is perhaps the last person who can make any credible complaint about a political opponent criticising him unfairly. Trump is one of very few national political leaders to suffer a significant loss of support because of the virus. Most national leaders have increased their support. This is a fatal political failure by Trump. Every leader has agonised over closing things down to stop the virus spread and opening up to keep the economy and society functioning. No one got the balance perfectly right. The second wave of COVID-19 roaring through Europe is worse than that hitting the US.

Even cautious European states such as France and Spain, when they had beaten back the first wave, opened up their borders for tourism. As a result, they got a massive second wave. When Victoria had its peak 700-odd cases in a day, Britain had about the same number. Now Britain’s daily new cases is in the tens of thousands, much of Britain is in modified lockdown. and hospitalisations and deaths are rising.

But Trump cannot mount an effective defence of himself in comparative terms. His rhetoric always overshoots. Often this is harmless, even effective, but when he said the virus would just disappear by Easter, and then that it would be over by summer, he gave needless hostages to fortune. Some very simple things he got wrong and didn’t change quickly enough. The most important was masks.

Epidemiologists are as near to unanimous on this as they are on anything: wearing masks reduces the spread of the disease. But masks are anathema to the most enthusiastic of Trump’s liberty-loving base. However, many non-ideological Americans are tired of lockdown and fatigued by COVID-19 restrictions. Maybe Trump’s message — in the debate and the campaign — that the US needs to cautiously open up may resonate.

Trump was successful in forcing the debate moderator to take seriously the issue of the explosive emails surrounding Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, which were first revealed in the New York Post. (The Post is published by News Corp, which also publishes The Australian.)

These emails, and the media story around them, are truly bizarre. They go a long way to validating Trump’s claim that he is opposed by a deep state, a Washington “swamp”, an intersecting set of power circles which object to his populism and nationalism.

The Post got the emails from Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer. They include emails to Hunter Biden from Ukrainian business partners thanking him for getting them time with Joe Biden when he was vice-president. If that email is true, then at the very least Joe Biden has told bare-faced lies when he claimed he had never discussed Hunter’s business dealings with his son. The emails also indicate that Hunter made big money out of China, from Chinese investors who saw their investment entirely as a way to curry influence and favour with his father.

During the debate, Biden — sounding like Trump in the face of similar allegations — simply asserted that he had always behaved entirely properly. Trump goaded Biden into making the extravagant claim that the laptop and everything associated with it were an invention of Russian disinformation. However, the Biden campaign at no point has said the emails are fakes. If they are fakes, the campaign would surely have said so.

The email revelations were further bolstered by a former business partner of Hunter Biden coming forward to say the business was all about making money for the Biden family, including Joe, and that the former vice-president was engaged in strategic decisions about the business. These emails seem to be genuine, and at the very least Biden has a serious case to answer. And he also clearly seems to have lied.

However, in one of the countless ironies of contemporary US politics, Biden is benefiting from the low ethical standards Trump himself has set. Team Trump wants voters to say they’re both pretty rough ethically but at least Trump gets things done, whereas voters seem to be saying all these politicians are grubby but Biden is nice old fella and not as grubby as Trump.

Nonetheless, in net terms the emails story must be damaging to Biden. It hurts him with any undecided voters, and it surely hurts enthusiasm in his base. The pro-Biden media, and the Big Tech-owned social media companies, have disgracefully refused to cover the story properly, building up — in the event of a Trump loss — a huge well of future resentment among the tens of millions who will vote for Trump.

The US taxpayer funded National Public Radio said the story was a distraction and it didn’t plan to cover it, surely a remarkable first for any news organisation. Twitter and Facebook engaged in rank censorship of anyone posting links to the email articles even as more and more evidence came in supporting their authenticity, and as the Biden campaign never denied the authenticity of the specific emails themselves.

Nonetheless, this won’t win the election for Trump nor lose it for Biden. The FBI said Iran, China and Russia had been making some efforts to interfere in the US election through accessing voter records and, from Iran, with disinformation emails. The Iranian and Chinese governments clearly hope that Trump will lose, but the American public is now completely turned off by these foreign interference stories.

Almost all the accusations against Trump turned out to be so baseless that they no longer seem to have any impact electorally. Again, ironically, this ends up helping Biden in staving off his controversies.

Trump has been distracted by all this, and until the past week or 10 days his campaign has been undisciplined and surprisingly ineffective, certainly compared with 2016.

Polls show the three biggest issues are COVID-19, the economy and healthcare. Biden rightly pointed out that while Trump is still trying to repeal Obamacare, Trump still hasn’t put forward any comprehensive healthcare plan of his own after nearly four years in office.

So, taking all this into account, can Trump still win?

Biden must be favoured at this stage, but Trump is surely still a chance. The range of possible results runs from the narrowest Trump victory in the Electoral College all the way through to a Biden landslide.

According to the RealClearPolitics poll average, Biden leads nationally by just under 8 per cent, and in the battleground states by 4 per cent. Nationally, Biden is a bit ahead of where Hillary Clinton was this time four years ago and almost exactly where she was in the battleground states.

Meanwhile, Trump is full of vigour and campaigning everywhere with unbelievable energy, while Biden has, astonishingly, taken three days off campaigning and sits quietly at home. That might seem weird. It is certainly unprecedented in modern times, but it indicates the Biden camp thinks they are way ahead and the only thing that can hurt them now is Joe’s mouth going haywire.

The polls are tightening, as they did last time. But, and this is a huge but, 50 million Americans have already voted under special postal vote arrangements to accommodate coronavirus difficulties on election day. Logically, they can’t be influenced by a last-minute swing. In 2016, about 130 million people Americans voted in total. This time it might be 140 million.

So there are not that many votes left for Trump to get. Nonetheless, Trump voters hate answering polls, they frequently lie to poll companies because — in these wildly polarised times — they fear that admitting to voting for Trump will get them put on a list and punished. And the election is still a question of turnout: motivation, rather than persuasion. Plus, Trump’s voters are more enthusiastic than Biden’s.

So it is still Biden’s election to lose, but Trump is not out of it. A purely non-political observation is that it would be the most fantastic fun to watch the collective nervous breakdown that would afflict the professional political class worldwide should Trump astonishingly triumph again.