USA is on Wrong Track. Dump Trump.

Wrong track. Maybe that is all that matters for election 2020. 

An idea is getting traction: Donald Trump isn't very good at being president.

Possibly elections with an incumbent president come down to a simple question of whether people think the country is on the wrong track or right track.

Not Trump

Rasmussen, the most Republican-leaning of major polling firms, reports that only 24% of likely voters think America is on the right track, compared with 69% on the wrong track. Monmouth has it at 18%-75%. NBC/Wall Street Journal has it at 19%-72%.  Click

Possibly that is the whole ballgame. 

When one has an incumbent president, even in a time of extreme partisanship, there are enough people to swing an election who are essentially unaligned. They are open to change of leadership, or they aren't. People open to change are telling pollsters they want the alternative to Trump and it happens to be Biden. They aren't excited about Biden but they are motivated to replace Trump. 

Biden, especially the Biden who is at home, doing video events, may be playing the exactly perfect role in this moment, the "Generic Democratic Alternative to Trump." The fact that he is familiar, qualified, experienced, and ready to step in as the alternative means voters don't actually need to look hard at him. Democrats like him because he is a Democrat. The swing voters that exist are ready to try him because America needs change because we are on the wrong track. Simple.

Sales puffery

Not necessarily. Thad Guyer has posited in guest posts here that the most important cycle is the 8-year oscillation, and that Republicans will get 8 years--not 4--in the White House to balance the 8 years Obama had, which oscillated from the 8 years that George W. Bush had, and so on back through the 20th Century more or less. 

Possibly Americans want a good long drink from the fountain of right populism, and 8 years of Trump would give it to them. America pursued a path of global thinking and open mobility of labor and populations for decades, and it continued under low drama Obama. This built up resentment by the people most squeezed and displaced by all the new foreigners at home and manufacturing competition abroad. Their jobs were under pressure and their identities were as well as white, Christian, heterosexual, "normal silent majority" people in the center of the American polity. They felt ignored by Democrats who thought the future of the party was with people with college and advanced degrees. People don't like being told they are inadequate and didn't want to hear about retraining themselves. They wanted to be respected for who they are. Trump got their votes. 

Those people have not gone away nor have their grievances. Biden does not present himself as the guy who will pick up and run with that grievance; he presents as the guy who will, once elected, ignore it, as it has been ignored for decades going back to Reagan. Yes, they cling to their guns and religion, and do it proudly. 

Trump could get re-elected. That mood is still out there.

Selling

But Trump is losing a message war. I persist in thinking message does matter, again on the margin, because I am seeing Trump fight that war. The contest is over whom to blame for the problems. Trump is acutely aware that people are restless. Salesmen know when the customers are reluctant. Trump can get the sale--be re-elected--if they see Trump as the solution, not the problem. That is what he is trying to do right now, make himself the hero of the story, not the villain.

Trump is blaming China--their virus, for the disease. He blames Germany for the defense costs of NATO--those cheapskates. His surrogates and allies are blaming Fauci--those so-called "experts" for the shutdowns. He is blaming Democratic governors for tolerating civil distress. Trump is blaming angry blacks and radical anarchists for trouble on the streets. He is blaming Joe Biden for being the sleepy, incompetent pawn of radical socialist extremists, for creating false solutions. 

It might work for Trump. He is extraordinarily adept at commanding the stage and branding his opponents. 

He has a problem: Germany has 81 million people and fewer than 300 new cases of the virus a day now. The USA has 60,000 new cases a day and Florida alone has 13,000. Americans mentally compare themselves with Western Europe and objectively they appear to have done a much better job. Trump's very public stance of minimization and denial on the virus looks like a failure, and a failure that stems from what we know about Trump, that he is a salesman who promotes blue sky and unicorns. His attacks on China and Fauci look phony. Europe and China itself dealt with the uncertainty at the beginning of the outbreak, but we are in the company of Mexico and Brazil. Americans don't compare themselves to Mexico. Trump looks desperate, and Fauci seems more trustworthy than Trump, by far. The Bible hoist at first looked like he was showing what side he was on, but as the image has aged over the weeks it is turning into an image of phony-ness and even contempt. The Bible was a prop.

Losing coaches get replaced

An idea among is gaining traction on how to think about Trump. It is fueled by the comments of former senior aides, by the comparison with Fauci, by the fact of his multiple late night intemperate tweets, by the general tone of daily drama at the White House, by the style of extravagant salesmanship. Enough people liked him as a candidate to give him a try because Trump was an an interesting, colorful character, and a fighter, and seemed to be fighting for America, and that sounded pretty good to enough people.

But the new idea spreading is that Trump is actually mostly interested in Trump himself, not the country, that he is a salesman pushing a flawed product because he isn't very good at being president.