{UAH} WHY THE HUNTER BIDEN STORY ISN'T STICKING

Why the Hunter Biden story isn't sticking

by Tiana Lowe, Commentary Writer | 

 

October 27, 2020 08:54 AM

 

After months of trailing Hillary Clinton in the polls, President Trump won the White House in 2016. Many blame James Comey's decision to announce the FBI had to reopen its investigation into the Democrat after her emails were found on Anthony Weiner's computer.

Four years later and fraught with the black swan of the coronavirus pandemic, Team Trump looks keen to replicate the eleventh-hour scandal to tar his opponent, this time with a series of scoops obtained from a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden.

His problem is that 2020 isn't 2016. The Hunter Biden scandal isn't sticking in part because Joe Biden simply isn't as uniquely loathed or perceived as any more corrupt than your standard class of career politician. Similarly important is the overt media bias in favor of Biden, as seen by NPR's explicitly glib dismissal of the story and the attempts of the New York Times and the Washington Post to downplay it.

But perhaps even more important is the timing. Rudy Giuliani dropped this story far too late amid an election dominated by a global pandemic sparring against an economic recovery.

With more than a week to go until Election Day, more people have voted than all of the early voting ballots cast in 2016. According to NBC, as of Monday, 62 million ballots have already been cast. Even if, as our Kristen Soltis Anderson predicts, 157 million voters turn out to vote instead of the 136 million people who did in 2016, that means that 2 in 5 people who will vote this year already have voted.

Mind you, strong partisans usually comprise the bulk of early voters, with late-undecideds more likely to wait until Election Day. But with the media working overtime to convince the public of mass voter suppression and the capacity constraints necessitated by the coronavirus, voters whom Trump conceivably could convince of the Hunter Biden mess are already voting.

"Hillary Clinton jeopardized national security by hosting classified information on a secret, private email server" was an easy narrative to understand, and one that clearly sounded like a cover-up. It's also one browbeat into the collective consciousness of the American people for more than a year. "Hunter Biden wandered around Kyiv and Beijing using the Biden family name to pick up bags of cash, oh, and he's a junkie — and maybe Joe Biden knew about it" is far too confusing to be sold with days to go until the polls close. Unless Tucker Carlson can drop the ultimate A-bomb as he's reportedly set to do tomorrow, it's too little, too late.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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