I'm somewhat pessimistic that we'll vote our way out of anything, though, mostly because of the sclerotic condition of our system. I suspect major change will have to come through events first rather than politics.
That said, I'm optimistic for Trump's chances. People forget how much of an outrageous wild card his victory was in 2016. One important thing to consider when talking about moderates is that Trump has already proven he is capable of not destroying the world or initiating WW3. This is very important.
Put yourself in moderate normie shoes in 2016. It wasn't that hard for regular people who aren't political junkies to buy into one or more of the following ideas:
- Trump is basically a Nazi who wants to gas all the Mexicans (within the first four years)
- Even if Trump isn't a Nazi, his election will lead to mass right-wing violence (within the first four years)
- Trump is an egomaniacal psycho who will nuke at least one country whose leader says something mean to him (within the first four years)
- Trump is an incompetent buffoon who will fuck up so bad that America will collapse (within the first four years)
The screeching was obviously inane to us, but I know a lot of people who just adopted some combination of these default views (perhaps attenuated a bit) because mass media gaslighting was so powerful, and because Trump truly was a wildcard. Imagine you're a default-left normie in 2016. Even though you're not glued to CNN or Buzzfeed, seeing Trump elected was still a momentous "what the fuck is going to happen to this country now" moment.
And then? Nothing terrible happened. The fervor of the progressive megaphone has stayed constant, of course, but it is falling on deafer ears every single day that World War III or Holocaust 2: Smokestack Boogaloo hasn't broken out. Someone posted a tweet recently where some liberals were bitching at each other, and one said something like "we can worry about policy differences after we eliminate the threat to our democracy." They still think he is going to install himself as some kind of dictator! We've always seen this as psychotic and tiresome, but now that the world
hasn't ended, it's starting to feel that way to a lot of regular people.
There's just a certain kind of person who is conformist enough to have passively bought into the "Trump bad" narrative, but who is practical enough to believe their own eyes over the narrative. At the very least, I think a lot of these people who voted for Hillary will just abstain this time. They now understand that Trump isn't going to end the world, and Biden is just too uninspiring to vote for.