If I got it right 10 days ago, then we emerged from the back-to-back political television events with the advantage to Republicans.
Here's what I wrote then: "[Joe] Biden needs for the virus to rage and for [Donald] Trump to continue saying inconsistent and ridiculous things about it, while Trump needs more smoky images like those from Portland and Chicago and for Biden to say modulated things about those."
So the news last week went all the Republicans' way.
The Centers for Disease Uncontrol and Political Capitulation yielded to public health sabotage from the scandalous Trump administration. The government's health agency issued new coronavirus testing guidelines saying testing was no longer necessary for people who had come in contact with an infected person.
Fewer tests mean lower numbers, though not fewer cases. Lower numbers would suggest a virus coming under control. The premise of maybe having the virus but not needing a test--that makes the virus seem like a common cold.
It's an advantage of brazenly corrupt incumbency that you can transform an agency designed to protect the healthful well-being of the citizens into one attending instead to the political needs of the emerging despot.
Then the president invited a couple thousand people to our lawn and sat them close. Only a handful managed to get past the Secret Service with masks.
On Wednesday amid appropriate outrage, the CDC backtracked but only a bit, saying people who'd been exposed still might want to consider getting tested.
Medical experts who said the initial directive was outrageous said the backtrack was too little. They said the dangerous mixed message had been sent that exposed people who seem well should go about their business, likely enhancing the all-too-common virus spread stemming from asymptomatic persons.
Trump subsequently mixed his message further by announcing the purchase of 150 million faster $5 tests, which didn't change the CDC guideline that you wouldn't require one simply because someone in your house was infected.
The president's long-stated position is that a lot of testing runs up the numbers unnecessarily, which makes us, and him, look bad.
That's like saying the football Razorbacks only kept losing the last two seasons because they didn't turn off the scoreboard.
In honor of our state's Trumpian fealty and the president's testing policy, the Hogs should never turn on the scoreboard this season.
They were getting positive tests so rapidly on college campuses in Alabama last week that Trump must have become afraid he wouldn't have any college football to watch while he fiddled.
Speaking of that, professional athletes were boycotting over powerful racial and police issues, but that's no matter to Trump. He can call those players America-hating Kaepernicks.
They are Democrats, thus anarchists, he can say. Real sports competition is collegiate football played by Trump supporters like Herschel Walker in Southern red states, don't you know?
In the meantime, the Republicans presented a television theme that the Democrats would let violent protesters take over the cities. Right on cue, a white policeman shot a Black man in the back seven times at point-blank range and violent protesters provided the helpful smoky backdrop.
Violence raged in Kenosha, Wis.--a swing state, to boot--where the story had become more that protests had turned destructive than that the white police officer shot the Black man in the back repeatedly and that a 17-year-old militia-child from Illinois had breezed into town with an assault-style weapon over his shoulder and shot and killed protesters.
Trump somehow makes all of that the fault of the party not in control. He assailed protesters but not police and not a vigilante. He sneered at the idea one could protest lawfully.
While Democrats were seeking to thread the needle that protest was called for but that violence--by police against Blacks, by protesters against property and by a child vigilante--had to stop, the Republican television miniseries starred two gun-toting white suburban museum denizens warning that protesters would be coming to suburbs unless suburbanites re-elect Trump.
That kind of racist-seeming rhetoric sounds as if it actually should not be an advantage for Republicans, but a shame upon them. Alas, though, values have been turned upside down in the Trump Era.
Racist innuendo, vigilantism, and advocating political interest over public health--those now are mainstream Republican positions.
And this probably is effective contemporary politics because the game for undecideds has devolved entirely to one of fear.
People who are undecided presumably see little positive in Trump and Biden. So, if you can make them more afraid of protesters filling suburban cul-de-sacs than of a virus so minor you needn't test for it, then you've got your knee on the back of the neck of this pivotally pliable portion of the electorate, cutting off vital oxygen to its brain.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.