2020 Election, Columnists, Coronavirus, Featured, Jon Caldara, National, Uncategorized

Caldara: It’s been a convenient year for Dems

Have you had this experience lately? You pull up to a stop light and the guy who’s completely alone in the car next to you has all his windows rolled up and he’s still wearing a face mask. You muse to yourself, “Gee, I wonder who he’s voting for?” Then you just shake your head.

COVID has become this election’s boogey monster. The media has all but pronounced it — if you vote for Republicans, you are voting for COVID and death.

As COVID is being leveraged for political gain, I find myself saying over and over, “Now isn’t that convenient.”

Let’s step into the Way-Back Machine and time travel back to February. What a different world.

In February every progressive nightmare was coming true. Tax relief combined with impressive deregulation was delivering the dreams Bernie was supposed to deliver, not Trump.

African-American and Hispanic unemployment was at an all-time low. In case you missed that, I said all-time low, like never in recorded American history. Overall unemployment had never been lower.

And the most important measurement of all was finally going the right way. After stagnating during the Obama years, pay raises for people on the lower end of the economic spectrum were growing faster than those at the top.

Weren’t these the results the capitalist-loathing left was supposed to produce when they got their way and instituted their redistribution schemes? But instead it was happening under Trump.

Trump was a shoo-in for re-election. The Senate would easily stay in Republican control.

I mean really the only thing back here in February that could stop Trump from being re-elected would be, oh I don’t know, some kind of economically devastating event to plunge us into massive and immediate recession, like a meteor strike on New York City or a pandemic.

So, wasn’t that convenient.

Trump is the first president to loudly recognize China for what it is, the new evil empire and the global hazard to freedom. Whether you support or despise his trade war, he is China’s biggest threat on the world stage. What if a pandemic started there, in China, giving them a head start and an obedient population to deal with it first and recover sooner? That would be convenient.

While we’re still back in February let’s remember that Trump was elected with the largest percentage of black voters any Republican received in modern history. No, he didn’t win a majority of the black vote, not even close, but he didn’t have to. He needed to peel away enough of this key voting block to win in swing states. He did.

And with black unemployment at an all-time low, he was going to do it again in 2020. I mean the only thing that could possibly stop it would be some kind of near race war with cities burning and rioting over perceived racism, perhaps connecting Trump’s support of law enforcement to racism. So wasn’t that convenient too.

You know what else would be convenient? Wholesale changing of election laws. allowing election day to drag on in swing states for an extra week. This would facilitate ballot harvesting after an election deadline.

While Colorado’s all-mail balloting system evolved over many election cycles to work out kinks and at least give the image of security with human signature verification, key states like Pennsylvania will be thrown into the deep end of the pool this year, sending ballots out like grocery store coupons, without verifying signatures. Convenient.

Early voting is favored by Democrats while Republicans, less trusting of mail-in ballots, are waiting to vote in person. So, you know what else would be convenient? How about if there was a flare-up of COVID cases giving Democratic politicians the excuse to lockdown our communities again just as in-person voting is about to get rolling. This would scare people to stay home or at very least make in-person voting more burdensome.

If Republicans locked-down communities just as most Democrats were about to vote, well, that would be called voter suppression.

You know what else would be convenient? A double standard in the media and on social platforms that wouldn’t cover stories damaging to Biden’s campaign, like his son selling political influence. Convenient that the media ignores it and Twitter blocks it.

All in all, 2020 has been a remarkably convenient year for those wanting political change.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

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