By Chris Satullo

As the weirdest election year ever lurches toward the finish(?) line, a few things about voters, politics, pundits and candidates still elude my understanding:

1) Biden bashing from within the ranks

This comes in two forms: He’s not progressive enough; he’s blowing it.

Or: He’s not active enough; he’s blowing it.

Some on the left Democratic flank remain convinced that the key to a landslide is for Biden to adopt, down to the last serif, their purist positions on Green New Deal, Medicare for All, Pack the Courts, Defund the Police etc. 

To which I ask: Have you met America? Have you been struck by amnesia, with no recollection of the last two Democratic presidential primaries? Your candidates, the ones who were mouthing your dreams, lost – convincingly.

Hate to break it, but you are not as numerous as you imagine. Woke Twitter is a tiny bubble. The bulk of your own party is not even with you yet. And your ideas, expressed the way you prefer, are emphatically not the lure to reel in independents or peel off disgruntled, one-time Trump backers.

Why can’t you just savor the fact that you’ve moved the “Overton Window”?  Why can’t you see that, in fact, Biden is offering modulated versions of your ideas that are far bolder than anything Hillary Clinton would have dared push? 

Presidential elections are binary, people. Perfect is never on the ballot.  Your vote is always a choice between two versions of imperfect. Refusing to accept that is not a form of higher wisdom or integrity; it’s rank immaturity.

As for those who feel that Biden might blow it if he doesn’t, right now, begin to adopt the more bustling, harder-hitting tactics you espouse, let me ask: What challenger since the dawn of polling has held a 10-point lead in the national polling average over an incumbent president two weeks before the election?

Just Joe Biden. So he must be doing something right. And part of that is knowing when to get  out of the way while your opponent sets himself on fire.

2) “But the polls were wrong in 2016!”

For one last time, not really. The final national polls had Clinton up by an average of 3.1 percent; she won the popular vote by 2.1 percent. That’s not a bad miss. The polls were actually farther off in 2012 – underestimating Barack Obama’s level of support. So, recognize that polling errors don’t always benefit the GOP candidate.

In 2016, Donald Trump drew to an inside straight and won. It happens. Not often, but it does.

For those of you who don’t play poker, an explanation of what that phrase means: Say you have in your hand, for example, a 5, 7, 8, 9  and a queen of different suits. Thus, your only chance to win the hand in draw poker is to discard your queen and hope to draw one of the four sixes in the deck, giving you the 5-6-7-8-9 straight. Not usually a winning gambit, but I certainly have drawn the missing card a few times in my checkered poker career.

But, with the polls the way they are, incumbent Trump’s hand is now way worse than in 2016. He’d have to draw both the 6 and the 7, at least, to win.

Let me share some advice for anxious and PTSD-ing Democrats from long-time GOP operative (but Never Trumper) Stuart Stevens, writing in The Bulwark. Here’s the last-fortnight mindset he urges them to adopt:

“We are going to crush Donald Trump and the sickness he represents. There are more of us than there are of them. We are right. They are wrong. This is our moment. This is our destiny. Walk with confidence. Do not falter. Victory will be ours.”

3) The durable myth that the GOP is better on the economy and fiscal discipline

Average growth in Gross Domestic Product per year under Democratic presidents since World War II: 4.4. percent.

Average under Republican presidents: 2.5 percent.

Last president under whom the federal government ran a surplus: Bill Clinton

President who racked up the highest deficit-to-GDP ratio since World War II: Donald Trump.

Many economists say this ratio – the federal deficit as a percentage of overall economic activity – is much more meaningful than raw deficit totals. The higher the ratio, the sketchier the nation’s finances.

So, OK, which presidents since Watergate have left office with a worse deficit-to-GDP ratio than the one they inherited (i.e. the ratio at the end of their first year in office)?  Here you go:  Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump (tempting fate by assuming this year is the end of his tenure).

Notice a trend there?  Deficits did explode in Obama’s first term, because he had to spentdfiercely to combat (mostly successfully) the huge recession he faced upon taking the oath of office. But the ratio fell throughout his term.

Now, it is absolutely true that presidents get way too much credit and blame for the state of the economy. They have more impact, but nothing like absolute control, over the deficit – and recall, deficits are not always bad. Sometimes, as in 2009, they are the best policy for the economy.

But still the general point holds: Based on the actual record, the myth that Republicans are better stewards of the economy and the federal budget is a bit like hailing the Cleveland Browns’ coaches over the last decade as far superior to Bill Belichick.

4) Voters who say they like Trump because he tells it like it is

I still see this being said in the kind of person-in-the-street stories that proliferate this time of year. “He tells you just what he’s thinking,” one woman told a reporter in one piece I just read.

Yes – but does it make no difference to you that “what he’s thinking”  turns out to be a stew of self-deluding fantasies, tired con-artist riffs, misused statistics, sophomoric insults and outright lies?

Well, not to that Pennsylvania woman. But polls suggest it does matter to many who pulled the lever for Trump in 2016.

It’s a smaller number than I would have hoped, but it’s clear much of the growth in Biden’s polling advantage comes from people who don’t love the Democratic nominee but can’t bear the idea of being forced to live inside Trump’s brain for another four years.

5) Dems who expect Republicans to do something they would never do

That said, let me also say this: People in the circles where I mostly move can get in a bad habit of acting as though the only reasons anyone might vote for Trump now are either fat-cat wealth, rank bigotry or a Cro-Magnon level of ignorance. When I feel myself lapsing into that mode, I remind myself that for many, party is a core identity that is powerfully hard to abandon.

I was raised a Democrat. I have voted for Republicans in the past when I found the Democratic candidate corrupt or clownish – but not once since Fox News became the house organ of the GOP.

What would it take for me to vote for the Republican these days in a presidential or Senate race? Hard to say. For starters, the Democratic candidate would have to have the ethics of a Rod Blagojevich and the intellect of a Rick Perry. And the Republican would have to be someone of the integrity and intellectual heft of a Jeff Flake i.e. the kind of person the modern GOP has been busily reviling and exiling for the last four years.

So, no, I can’t imagine voting Republican for as long as Mitch McConnell rules the Senate and Fox pundits drive the party’s agenda. 

So, it simply won’t do for me to underestimate the emotional and intellectual struggle it would take a loyal, lifetime Republican to reject that cherished identify and vote blue.

Some are – and I hope more do.  But it’s hypocritical to treat that as an easy choice.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.