Four years and one week ago, reporting on Decision 2016, I told a possibly apocryphal story about British prime minister Harold Macmillan. As the story goes, shortly after his election a reporter asked him what might cause his agenda to go off the rails. As legend has it, Macmillan replied, “Events, dear boy. Events.”
That story four years ago was driven by the news of a terrorist attack at the American Airlines counter at the Brussels airport. The premise of that report was that events were shaping the 2016 election and doing so in a way that favored Donald Trump.
Events this cycle are much closer to home than the terrorist attacks that were plaguing Europe. The COVID-19 outbreak is emerging as what might prove to be the biggest story of a century that’s not yet old enough to legally buy a drink. Freedoms we take for granted in America been curtailed to a degree that no one would have thought possible as recently as a month ago. The economy has been decimated. James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, predicts that the unemployment rate – only recently at its lowest levels in history – could soon reach 30 percent.
The campaign for president is for all intents on hold. Primary elections in 13 states have been postponed. That includes the six primaries originally scheduled for April. Joe Biden leads Bernie Sanders in the Democratic race by a comfortable margin. But the postponement of so many primary elections makes it impossible for Biden to put the nomination away.
Campaign events are not happening. Events have reduced the Joe Biden campaign to posting videos from the basement in Biden’s home. There are no campaign rallies. There’s no shaking of hands and kissing of babies. Campaign volunteers aren’t out in primary states planting candidate yard signs. Local campaign storefront offices are empty. The news cycle is virtually devoid of any campaign reporting. It’s almost as if there’s no presidential election coming at all.
But of course there is. The Democrats are still scheduled to hold their convention in Milwaukee in July. The Republicans are still set for Charlotte in August.
The only thing that voters are seeing is an incumbent president doing what about 60 percent of them judge – according to a Gallup poll last week – to be a good job handling a crisis of unprecedented proportion.
As recently as the New Hampshire Primary, everyone in the pundit class was busy looking at the primary election calendar and doing the math on delegates. Bernie Sanders was, at that time, looking as if he might actually win the Democratic nomination. The Biden campaign was on life support.
Fast forward just six weeks and nothing we were thinking then has anything to do with what’s actually happening now. No one in the pundit class with a functioning brain stem would dare predict today what things will look like in six weeks.
As Harold Macmillan said in 1957 and as we said four years ago, “Events dear boy. Events.”