WE’RE THE REPLACEMENTS
In a couple of posts, I’ve mentioned that one of the wild cards in the 2020 election is the fact that the top candidates (to include Bernie Sanders at the time) were all in the high-risk demographic for COVID-19, which tends to be more fatal for elderly patients. Trump is the youngest of the bunch at 74, and both he and Biden are the oldest candidates in American history (so would Sanders if he was still running, obviously).
So considering that neither party has officially nominated their candidates yet, and as macabre as it may be, it’s worth asking now: what happens if one or both candidates either dies or is incapacited by COVID-19 before the conventions, or before the election, or between election day and the inauguration?
FiveThirtyEight explains the options here.
The TL;DR version: As it happens, both parties have backup plans, and have done for a long time. The biggest problem will be if the nominee dies too close to Election Day when the ballots have already been prepared with his name on them. The party would have to agree on a replacement in time to update the ballots, or at least make it clear to voters who their actual choices are. And then you have the problem of mail-in and absentee ballots.
Anyway, one interesting aspect of the article is this: in all of American history, this has never actually been tested. At most we’ve had to replace running mates at the last minute, but we’ve never had a scenario where a frontrunner dies before the convention or a POTUS nominee dies before the election.
Hopefully this year won’t be the first - not least because the American political landscape is already dominated by paranoid hyperpartisan batshit where the slightest irregularity will spawn a metric ton of half-assed conspiracy theories if the result is someone other than their preferred candidate - and that’s without the complication of COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing. If those conditions are still in place when it’s convention time - or on Election Day - people are likely to trust the results even less, unless the parties can make the process as transparent as possible. Which they probably won’t because lol no.
Put simply, you probably couldn't pick a worse year to experiment with this kind of thing. So let’s hope it doesn’t come to that - the pre-plague situation was bad enough.
Keep yrself alive,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1639823.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
So considering that neither party has officially nominated their candidates yet, and as macabre as it may be, it’s worth asking now: what happens if one or both candidates either dies or is incapacited by COVID-19 before the conventions, or before the election, or between election day and the inauguration?
FiveThirtyEight explains the options here.
The TL;DR version: As it happens, both parties have backup plans, and have done for a long time. The biggest problem will be if the nominee dies too close to Election Day when the ballots have already been prepared with his name on them. The party would have to agree on a replacement in time to update the ballots, or at least make it clear to voters who their actual choices are. And then you have the problem of mail-in and absentee ballots.
Anyway, one interesting aspect of the article is this: in all of American history, this has never actually been tested. At most we’ve had to replace running mates at the last minute, but we’ve never had a scenario where a frontrunner dies before the convention or a POTUS nominee dies before the election.
Hopefully this year won’t be the first - not least because the American political landscape is already dominated by paranoid hyperpartisan batshit where the slightest irregularity will spawn a metric ton of half-assed conspiracy theories if the result is someone other than their preferred candidate - and that’s without the complication of COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing. If those conditions are still in place when it’s convention time - or on Election Day - people are likely to trust the results even less, unless the parties can make the process as transparent as possible. Which they probably won’t because lol no.
Put simply, you probably couldn't pick a worse year to experiment with this kind of thing. So let’s hope it doesn’t come to that - the pre-plague situation was bad enough.
Keep yrself alive,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1639823.html. Please comment there using OpenID.