I don’t personally care who wins the upcoming election. I can see strategic advantages to victory by either side. But I strongly suspect that regardless of who wins the losing side will accuse the winning side of cheating.

A reader writes:

“…if [the Trumpists] are able to successfully retain those voters who prioritize economic issues (and are able to convince enough of them that Trump didn’t, in fact, betray them), and that plays out where they need it to electorally (just like in 2016 with the rust belt states), then that may eke out the win for them.

If that happens, then I expect things to get pretty heated within the Democratic Party, as the neoliberals and progressives/social democrats will each bitterly blame the other one for Trump’s victory. Neolibs will want to further consolidate their hold on the party to come back in 2024, but their second loss to Trump may cripple that. I think progressives would become more desperate to actually win while also growing in number (mostly from the young, as well as from some newly disillusioned neoliberal-aligned party base types).

At the same time, the Democratic Party would also be put in the awkward position of having to contend with Biden’s own repeated assertion that “America can survive 4 years of Trump, but not 8″, which I think — at the risk of sounding hyperbolic — might push some MSNBC-true-believer types (and maybe some radicalized progressives) into actual, potentially violent derangement (which, for the record, I think would also happen with a fair number of Trump-cult true-believers if Biden won). And in that kind of situation, it doesn’t matter if it’s only a handful of fringe hyper-partisan basket cases who end up in that dangerous mental space — it only takes one such individual to successfully do something drastic and precipitate some new even uglier chapter we will all have to live through. That may not happen, but it’s a worry I’ve had more and more the past few years.”