When you think of it, it's nothing short of incredible that Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party.  One might have thought 2016 would have been Biden's year (if he was ever going to have a time at bat), since Barack Obama's two-term presidency had just ended, and most vice presidents who try for the top spot do so immediately following their bosses' departures.  But, as is often the case in politics these days, party nominees can result from when the party decides it's someone's "turn."  That was the case the last go-around: the Democrats decided that it was Hillary's turn, after she dutifully lost to Obama in 2008 so the country could elect its first non-totally-white president.  The election in 2016 was supposed to have been Hillary's — the first female president.  But it didn't turn out that way.

Since then, without warning, China unleashed the coronavirus.  We'll let others debate whether it was a total accident from a random occurrence at a so-called "wet market" or whether it was a deliberate release of a bio-weapon made in some nefarious Chinese weapons lab or something somewhere in between those two vastly-separated extremes.  It actually doesn't matter.

The completely unforeseen coronavirus event has paralyzed the American economy.  It has also completely re-shuffled the 2020 presidential race.  It's no longer a referendum on President Trump's performance in office, on his handling of traditional issues like job creation, energy production, taxes, foreign relations, and judicial appointments.  Instead, it is now a referendum on President Trump's handling of the coronavirus crisis.  Predictably, the liberal media shifted their former cries of Russia, Russia, Russia! to outbursts of ventilators, ventilators, ventilators!  President Trump handled that perfectly, and the ventilator issue went away.  Now it's been replaced with tests, tests, tests!  Tomorrow it will be something else, possibly "open too soon" or "second wave."  It will always be something, and it will always have racial or discriminatory overtones.

Enter Joe Biden.  Despite Hillary having lost in 2016 and the Democratic Party seemingly obsessed and totally committed to its identity politics narrative, somehow, from an opening field filled with females and non-whites, the Democrats ended up with yet another old, straight white guy in Biden, a Washington, D.C. insider, a multiple-time presidential candidate flop, someone with perhaps the most forgettable, inconsequential multi-decade senatorial career in American political history.  That he is certainly too old and well past the point where he's mentally up to the task doesn't even need to be mentioned.

Yet, incredibly, Biden might win. The impact of the over-the-top liberal media can't be discounted.  The Jim Acostas, Jonathan Karls, and Maggie Habermans of the world do their best every day at the Coronavirus Task Force press briefings to trap the president and make him look bad with relentless "gotcha" questions, despite how infantile and unintellectual it is.  They've pushed the narrative that President Trump has been slow to respond to the pandemic, and the more outlandish hosts on CNN and MSNBC have gone so far as to say President Trump has blood on his hands and that Americans are dying today because Donald Trump is president.  Utter nonsense, provably false.  But the old cliché of "repeat a lie often enough and it becomes true in some people's minds" is being proven true once again.

The polls show that Biden is competitive — even leading — in several crucial battleground states at this juncture.  Real Clear Politics shows Biden with leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida.  Now, there is no question that Trump's support in polls is and always will be understated by 5–10 points due to a combination of polling and sampling bias and the reluctance of some Trump-voters to admit to poll-takers — even under the shield of anonymity — to supporting President Trump.  It is also true that April is a long way off from November, and at this point, the national liberal media have been largely successful in hiding Biden's egregious mental lapses and unquestioned diminished capacity from the still inattentive swath of undecided voters.

Yet with all that being said, the fact that barely coherent Joe Biden is leading President Trump shows how politically fortunate the Chinese coronavirus has been for the Democrats' electoral chances in November.  Such are the ever shifting vagaries of presidential politics.