Being pessimistic, this is how you have a clearly predictable election - put a clear villain as the other candidate, put a walking corpse as the “good” candidate, make everyone doubt but slowly-slowly accept that you have to vote for the corpse, and then replace the corpse with the person who some time before had kinda ominous reputation, and everybody is suddenly enthusiastic.

“Better than Trump” is not arguable, but this is still the lesser evil.