For a lot of Democrats, election evening in 2016 unfolded with the sickening trajectory of a horror film through which the teenage protagonists get
For a lot of Democrats, election evening in 2016 unfolded with the sickening trajectory of a horror film through which the teenage protagonists get away the beer and occasion on, unaware that the serial killer they thought they’d vanquished is looming outdoors the window.
The watch events, the pantsuits, the balloons, the blue-tinted cocktails, the giddiness, the sense of historical past, the electoral projections displaying that Hillary Clinton would absolutely defeat Donald J. Trump — to Democrats, these now appear like quaint snapshots from some credulous prelapsarian world. And now, with the subsequent presidential election approaching and Joseph R. Biden Jr. properly forward of President Trump within the polls, the traumatized, anxious Democratic voters of 2020 don’t make the identical mistake once more.
“I’m assuming in my thoughts that Trump wins, as a result of I can’t take care of being let down like that once more,” mentioned Helen Rosenthal, a Democrat who represents the Higher West Facet on the New York Metropolis Council. “Secretly, in just a little nook behind my thoughts, I’m wishing and hoping that Biden wins. However most of my mind is saying, ‘OK, Trump wins and New York is just not getting a fiscal bailout and we’re going to lose extra floor on the setting, we’re going to lose on Roe v. Wade, we’re going to lose on well being care.’”
“I’m already depressed about it, if that helps,” she added.
It’s arduous to overstate the diploma of hysteria in America proper now, because the nation confronts a Hydra of troubles: the pandemic, the financial system, the fires, the protests, the violent plots in opposition to public officers, the assault on voting rights, the state-sponsored disinformation, the sense that democracy itself is on the poll.