Sam's Weekly Political Digest - US Election Special (sigh)

Unless you’ve emigrated to the Ecuadorian mountains to live as a humble farmer (probably a good idea like) or actually live in Donald Trump’s brain (less of a good idea, I feel), you will be only too aware that the United States of America had its 59th Presidential Election last week. A far cry from George Washington netting 43,782 votes in 1788, it’s projected that Joe Biden has grabbed around 75 million votes to become the 46th President of those United States.

And what a shitshow it was.

I feel that we were all aware that this wasn’t going to be a usual Presidential election, but I’m not sure many people truly understood what we were going to be in store for. It took four days to declare a projected winner, with the highest turnout ever since universal suffrage became a thing in 1920, and the incumbent President has still yet to concede defeat (and I’m truly not sure he ever will). 2020, much like 1800 and 2000, will go down as a defining moment in the history of humanity.

But what actually happened? Let’s take a look.

The Electoral College

I’m gonna start with an explanation of America’s insane electoral system, and why the person with the most votes doesn’t always win. You see, when the Thirteen Colonies of America won independence from Great Britain, this came with a natural distaste for the British way of doing anything. They vehemently opposed the fusion of powers (that is, the executive (Prime Minister) being drawn from the legislature (House of Commons)) and wanted a complete separation of powers – their executive (the President) being elected individually to their legislature (the Senate and the House of Representatives). At the time, states had completely different methods of operation. The northern states – Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachussetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island – were more based in ‘professionalism’, the development of banking, manufacturing, docking etc… The southern states – Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia – were still heavily dependent on slavery for their economic output and their day-to-day running, however, and so refused to give in to a direct election of the President because this would create much difficulty in regards to who actually got to vote in this states. To avoid this problem altogether, the decision was made for each state to have ‘electors’, people who represented the state according to its population and made the decision on who the state was going to choose as President.

Over time, this has turned into a formality. Now, the electors still exist, but they ‘choose’ who the state wants as President dependent on the people of that state actually taking a direct vote for President. That seems completely fair and rational, but becomes very complex when you consider how little of the population actually resides in a large number of the states, and how states are legally required to have a minimum of 3 electors. Take this example:

California, the most populous state, holds around 40 million people and has 55 electors. The 23 least populous states – Alaska, DC, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Nebraska, New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nevada, Utah, Connecticut – combine to hold around 41 million people, but have 102 electors between them. So the same amount of people from California hold about half as much voting power as the 41 million people from those 23 named states.

The ‘Electoral College’ system, as it is referred to as, may have made sense at the time when America only had around 50,000 eligible voters, but in a country of nearly 330 million people it cannot truly be called fit for purpose or truly representative.

But What Did It Mean For This Election?

For this election, it meant that we basically knew which states actually mattered. California hasn’t voted Republican since 1988, and with its increasing population and movement to very liberal values, there’s no point even wondering if it was going to vote for anything but the Democrat Party and Joe Biden. New York hasn’t voted Republican since 1984 – and that was only really because Ronald Reagan was a maverick – so its 29 electoral votes were safe for the Democrats and Uncle Joe.

We knew the states that really mattered were the ‘swing’ states, the ones that never regularly declare for one party or another: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida. Add into this the Democrats boldly believing they had chances to keep the recently swung state of Nevada, plus any of Arizona, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia, and we had nine key states to keep our eyes on. You win a majority of these, you become the President. It really is that simple.

When the night began, it quickly became clear that Trump had started strongly. His tactic of telling his voters to wait for Election Day, and not use the now-infamous mail-in ballots, had him up early in every single one of these states. In Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, the early mail-in ballots hadn’t been allowed to be counted until voting had completely closed. However this wasn’t the case in Florida, and it quickly became clear that Trump had resoundingly won the state’s 29 electoral votes by a margin of around 400,000. It was an early warning sign, but the voter data didn’t seem to back it up for the rest of the country; Trump had extended his vote share from 2016 in Florida’s heavily Latino counties, but lost ground in its predominant non-Latino ones. If this was to be the only demographic that Trump had convinced to vote for him more than in 2016, it didn’t bode well in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania et. al. where the Hispanic population is basically non-existent. Texas had narrowed but the Hispanic vote had stayed, giving Trump the second most populous state in the country, but it was to be a minor footnote in the end as the next few days became some of the most bizarre in modern political history.

As the days unfolded and the mail-in ballots were allowed to be counted, the picture of the 2020 Presidential election became much less of a blur. Those who chose to vote early and to stay at home on election day, avoiding long queues and the potential of catching that pesky rona, overwhelmingly cast their votes for the Democratic Party’s Joe Biden.

Minnesota was the first to be realised, with Donald Trump’s aims of turning that state red quickly nipped in the bud. Wisconsin was the next to go, with Biden taking the lead around midday on Wednesday and never looking back. Michigan was a little more tense, but Thursday afternoon heralded a Joe Biden victory in the state. If the mail-in ballot vote was to hold this heavily for Biden, it was only a matter of time before Nevada and Arizona were beyond Trump’s reach, before he even fumbled Georgia, and before Pennsylvania’s crucial 20 electoral votes changed hands.

It was Friday before it happened, but the reality was all too clear. The mail-in ballots in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia – Pennsylvania’s two biggest cities – were too bountiful and too overwhelmingly blue for The Donald to hold out. Biden took a slender lead, and over the coming hours it changed into a slim lead, a hopeful one, and then a commanding one. It was midday on Saturday when all of the major news networks finally declared Joe Biden to have won the state of Pennsylvania and, with that, enough electoral votes to be the next President of the USA.

The Trump Reaction

The fallout is going to be quite nasty. Donald Trump has spent the entirety of the past year – props to journalist Mehdi Hasan for pointing this out to me very early (@mehdirhasan on Twitter, I would recommend the follow) – trying to undermine the integrity of mail-in ballots. He’s launching lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada to try and invalidate large numbers of ballots, so as to give himself the victory. The problem with this is that none of the independent observers of the counting process have claimed to see any irregularities with the process. The stories of voter fraud and the changing of ballots, or the ‘dumping’ of them from trucks to be filled in for Biden, are all seemingly coming from the Trump camp and the ardent Trump supporters. Unless they have cold, hard evidence (which I’m afraid they don’t), there’s simply no way that five state tallies can be overturned, and Trump needs all five of those states to turn.

What can you expect from that man anymore? He has taken to the highest office in the western world – and one of the most influential positions on the entire planet – and completely gone against the grain of what we have come to know from it. He sat in the role that symbolises the dominance of the global north, the seat from which so much moralistic crooning about the sanctity of democracy and the exceptionalism of the west has been done, and attempted to completely delegitimise the very simple function of democracy. Casting votes and having them counted is a simple enough process, and it is a process that America takes its entire worth from. It takes its worth from this because it knows that, if it takes pride in that, then it can declare a moral superiority over any other part of the world that doesn’t follow like-for-like in its stead. The story of America launching coups and invading other ‘non-democratic’ countries in order to restore democracy is a story as old as the country itself, but America only has the legitimacy to do this on the world stage if it is not being hypocritical. On Wednesday, the US Embassy in the Ivory Coast tweeted out a statement declaring that ‘The United States calls on the Ivory Coast’s leaders to show commitment to the democratic process…’ in light of the Ivorian President winning a third term despite their constitution saying you can only sit for two. I don’t think anybody reading this needs me to point out just how hilariously hypocritical that statement is, let alone releasing it at any point over the past week. America as a neo-imperialist global empire, exerting influence over every single other country in the world, depends on the moral superiority of the free and fair election. Donald Trump is attempting to undermine that. He is casting doubt on the democratic process, and for that reason, nobody in their right mind in a position of power in that country would let him serve four more years as President.

So What Did We Learn From This?

Firstly, let’s take a collective sigh of relief. This was the closest that the western world had come to fascism being the reigning doctrine in a country since Spain turned into a liberal democracy after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. Whilst I’m not convinced by centrism being the answer, every time fascism is defeated we must take hope and be happy.

The American people rejected Donald Trump. There were enough Americans who voted for the man in 2016 who realised the error of their ways, or who didn’t vote at all, who knew he simply could not be allowed four more years at the helm. These are people, however, who could and did vote for him four years ago, and it will be very important for the Democratic Party to realise why they did. The downturn of economic hope and prosperity, the rise in living costs and the declining quality of life, the narrative that this is the fault of foreigners taking hold in society and winning, all of these contributed to the Trump victory in 2016. None of this is going to be combated if the country is taken back to the same trajectory it was on before 2016. A new path is needed, new policies to combat rising unemployment, a lack of healthcare provision, a lowering quality of life, high house prices, exploitative workplace practices, and an abhorrent culture around the existence of non-white people.

Whilst Joe Biden himself is pretty moderate politically, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in a similar position on the political spectrum, the Biden campaign embraced all aspect of the Democratic Party. They used prominent left-wingers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as spokespeople, whilst Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Stacey Abrams became crucial voter mobilisers in the swing states of Minnesota, Michigan, and Georgia respectively. Most importantly for myself from a socialistic perspective, however, is the way that the party platform that Biden ran on was influenced by the left wing of the party. In my eyes, these policy proposals are the main way that we move past the environment and the culture that allowed Trump to become President in the first place. There appears to be much cynicism towards this from more moderate members of the Democratic parties who saw their majorities in the House of Representatives or the Senate narrow. They appear to blame ‘the left’ as some sort of homogenous idea for limitations on their own race. I am, of course, biased, but I’m not sure how believable this is. In a country like America, which has such stark differences all across it in voter demographic and issues voters care about, I don’t know how you can just blame an entire ideological grouping for problems with your own campaign. America’s most predominant socialists – Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Tlaib – all won re-election in their own districts. Parts of the country clearly have an appetite for it, and parts don’t. I think moderates blaming ‘the left’ can simply be boiled down to a deep dislike for actual left wing politics.

And this brings me on to another important point. Alongside the Presidential election came the elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate. Whilst the Democrats retained their majority in the House, they only managed to flip three seats, whilst the Republicans flipped eight (which is a Republican net gain of five, for any of you counting out there). In the Senate, meanwhile, the Republicans are on course to retain 50 Senators, with the two Senate seats in Georgia going down to what is called a ‘Runoff’ election in January, because nobody in either of Georgia’s Senate elections received over 50% of the vote. For the Democrats to have actual control over the policy agenda for the next few years, they need to win both of Georgia’s Senate seats, something which is highly unlikely.

What that means is that whilst winning the Presidency, the Democrats will have lost ground in the House and won’t have controlled the Senate since 2016. What this suggests to me is that, whilst Trump was rejected nationally, conservative policy and conservative values in America are going nowhere fast. There is still a major proportion of the population that feel the Republican Party – not Donald Trump – represent them. This is a particularly dangerous place to be in, and the Democratic Party need to take a serious introspective look if they’re going to attempt to control the policy agenda in the US for years to come. If they can place a particular emphasis on convincing key areas of the country for the need for Biden’s policy platform to be implemented entirely, not voted down by the Senate, this will go some way performing one of the key facets of politics, which is getting your opinion to be the preferred one. But don’t just take my word for it, read Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s interview with the New York Times in which she details just how behind the times her own party is: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/07/us/politics/aoc-biden-progressives.html.

To conclude, this victory should be celebrated entirely. For now, fascism has been defeated. But ugly views rear their ugly heads much more often than most of us on the opposite side of opinion like to admit, and we need to be ready for it. The Trump Presidency never should be forgotten or discarded to the annals of history for the key reason that it actually happened. The country, at the time, wanted it to happen. And to ensure it doesn’t happen again, we need to look at the reasons people wanted him – their disenfranchisement with the Democrats, a deep dislike of the establishment and mainstream politics, a drop in their quality of life, the lack of good pay and enjoyable jobs, the rising prices of houses, of luxury goods, of food, of water, the demonization of immigrants becoming the dominant narrative – and work every single day of our lives to make sure these reasons are dealt with. If that gets done, we can ensure Trump and his like never get to those position of power again.