Your Midwest correspondent is ready for a plate of fries and for this all to be over. Hello, I’m Lyz Lenz and I am sitting in a hotel in Des Moines, Iowa at the election night headquarters for Democrat Theresa Greenfield, who is challenging incumbent Sen. Joni Ernst.
I covered the caucuses here in Iowa and accurately predicted that they would be a nightmare. Like the Cassandra of Corn I screamed about the caucuses until absolutely everyone was sick of me.
I also learned other things and one take away, I learned early on, even before the pandemic, was that Americans are exhausted and afraid. They want to cling to the safest candidate possible. For Iowans, that apparently meant “Undecided”, who at the time, was polling the highest in the Democratic caucuses. At the time, I wrote:
Right now, it’s undecided who is winning the caucuses, polling at 45 percent according to the Des Moines Register. Undecided hasn’t polled this well since 1976, when he won the caucuses, beating out Jimmy Carter. Undecided is a candidate who hegdes. He’s a man who thinks women aren’t electable. He’s a candidate who worries we are alienating the “businesses” and maybe messing “too much” with healthcare. Undecided has no vision beyond November of 2020, besides winning. Undecided is afraid and banking on your fear to paralyze you.
That fear eventually coalesced around Joe Biden, who made himself the kind of candidate everyone could feel comfortable forgetting about. Even his biggest scandals, we’ve conveniently forgotten.
It’s a self-preservation. Because, frankly, we are sick of knowing who the Postmaster General is. The Trump presidency has been so corrupt, and so upsetting that it’s turned into the new American Soap Opera and the story-line is our lives. For the past four years, we’ve been obsessing over politics and political players for four years. We now all know the names of the most bit-players in the American drama. We wake up every morning to be tossed into another scandal, another story, that will shadow our days with doom.
A Morning Consult poll shows that 90 percent of Biden supporters and 84 percent of Trump supporters just want this all to be over. Both Biden and Trump supporters also show high levels of anxiety and fear. But Biden supporters seem to be more afraid and more anxious.
If this election is about anything, it’s that Americans want to forget about politics and take a nap. If Trump wins, it’s because there are a lot of Americans who don’t care about the drama. Or it’s because it’s not their lives at stake and make a lot of money off the tax breaks it generates.