As the coronavirus pandemic continues to cause disruption across the world in so many different aspects of life, it’s been easy to forget that there is a US presidential election looming large on the horizon. In many ways, it feels like yesterday that Donald Trump overcame the odds to defeat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and take back the White House for the Republican Party.
With Trump’s first term in office now coming to a close, it looks like Joe Biden, who served as vice-president to Barack Obama during his eight years in office, is odds-on to be the Democratic challenger this time around, and the odds on the 2020 US Presidential Election suggest that he may have a better chance than first thought.
If Biden is to overcome Trump, he will need to zero in on the areas in which Trump has caused controversy, and use these flaws in the president’s conduct to further his own bid to win back the White House. Here, we look at a few areas in which Biden could gain an advantage over Trump in the months leading up to the election.
Handling of the pandemic
One of the biggest issues ahead of the election that will inform voters is how Trump has handled the coronavirus crisis that has swept across the globe. With the US sadly posting the highest Covid death toll in the world, Trump has come in for criticism in how he has handled the pandemic, with some believing the president has not taken the virus seriously enough and has not implemented adequate lockdown measures to prevent its spread.
Indeed, Trump has launched various tirades at both China and the World Health Organization (WHO) in light of the virus’ spread, and the president even took the bold recent step of severing the USA’s ties with WHO.
While Biden is unable to have little direct impact on this aspect of election influence, voters who will have been on the fence as to whether to vote for Trump or not may have been swayed against him as a result of the president’s handling of the crisis.
Social media controversy
Another area in which Trump has caused controversy is in his social media presence, particularly his Twitter profile. In recent weeks, Twitter has taken action against the president by including a fact-checking warning message below one of Trumps tweets regarding mail-in ballots, encouraging users to ‘get the facts about mail-in ballots’.
This was followed by Twitter’s decision to hide one of Trump’s tweets, with the social media site claiming that the president had broken Twitter’s rules about glorifying violence by tweeting “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, in relation to the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
Biden could use this social media controversy as a way to garner voters, by both highlighting areas where he disagrees with the president, and by presenting a contrasting perspective of himself on his own social media profiles.
Swaying the swing states
Of course, Biden’s main task must be to regain the crucial swing states which handed Trump the victory in 2016. This will require a focused, determined campaign from the 77-year-old, to get ahead in the US politics betting tips and convince voters that he is indeed the man to bring the country forward and heal the divisions which have been so accentuated in the US in recent years.
It’s unclear what the campaign trail will look like this year, given the nature of the coronavirus pandemic, but whatever form it takes, a concerted effort on the part of Biden and his team could lead to a memorable victory come November.
