Again: What Have I Been Saying?

The most hard-core MAGA Republicans and ye ole bed-wetting Dems have nothing in common

Except a near-religious devotion to one thing: But 2016!

Yet that race, and the more recent D primary, are instructive for different reasons than they think >https://t.co/au3rsjVX9M

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) May 15, 2020

Then he competed against a deeply unpopular Democrat, Mrs. Clinton, whose gains in the polls often depended on Mr. Trump’s doing or saying something that got him in trouble. It was perhaps inevitable, strategists say, that many voters who disliked both candidates broke Mr. Trump’s way after the F.B.I. reopened its investigation into Mrs. Clinton in the campaign’s final days. This is to say nothing of the millions of voters who doubted that Mr. Trump would win and therefore either didn’t vote for president or cast a third-party ballot.

Short version:  this ain't 2016.  Trump is still running on "racial grievances and attacks on the political establishment," but he can't escape being the political establishment.  And that establishment is in shambles:

“As a president, we basically, the only analogy I can think of is if Joe McCarthy from the McCarthy era had become president,” Sachs said. “This man in his venom and paranoia makes claims, waves papers, says ‘worst crimes.’ He’s such a despicable human being, but he’s actually blocking the capacity for national action.”

Governors and mayors are left to handle the crisis on their own instead of relying on the president’s leadership, he said.

“What I would say to governors and mayors is, you’ve got to trace every case, every day,” Sachs said. People who are confirmed should be called. Are they safe at home or do they need to be moved to quarantine? The number of mistakes, by the way, being made at the state and local level is also shocking. Putting infected people from hospitals into nursing homes in my own state, it makes you cry because thousands of people are dying unnecessarily.”

“We’re so unequipped, and we have this vulgar fool who is blocking all the action at the national level,” he added. “We can’t really do this without a national government. Trump has to stand aside and let there be a serious response so that this country doesn’t have a great depression and this calamitous death toll. They go together. There’s no economic health trade-off. That’s the biggest lie. Unless this epidemic is controlled, our economy will stay in depression.”

The NYT article makes much of the "political moment."  And the fact is, without campaigning, Biden is leading Trump almost everywhere he isn't tied with Trump.  Campaigning is a factor, ads are a factor; just not the only factor.  But the wind is at Biden's back, not Trump's.  And there are no longer "millions of voters who [doubt] that Mr. Trump [can] win and therefore [won't] for president...."

This ain't 2016.