US Presidential Election 2020

[glenshane]

@Gman

Trump increased his polling of black peoples votes from 6% to 12%. So there is still 88% of black voters not wanting Trump in.

I think you’ve made a few assumptions there, but that’s not the point I was making. The ‘trump racist/biden anti racist’ doesn’t stand up to any real scrutiny, bit I suppose it wasn’t meant to…given the target audience etc

[Tim_Riggins]

@Fagan_ODowd

Deep dread as Trump is resilient and electorally competitive

After an economic and public health shock, after four years of exhausting drama, after impeachment, Americans have not emphatically rejected either Donald Trump or Trumpism. Even if he loses the White House to Joe Biden, that will be the central lesson of the US election for a watching world, as much as for one nation’s anxious liberals.

An unfancied president made short work of Florida (the pollsters’ Waterloo) and put paid to rash talk of a blue Texas. At worst, Trump will lose by a respectable margin. He may yet prevail, with or without the legal action he trailed in a statement that was no less grim for its predictability.

Naturally, a Biden win, even a slight one, is a better outcome for liberalism than Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. But the absence of a landslide and a strongly Democratic Senate will sting. Four years ago, the party could cite excuses and circumstances: an unpopular candidate, an opponent with no political history to attack.

This time, they have no such solace. Democrats nominated a seasoned and unobjectionable moderate. They ran on the fundamentals of public health and prosperity. They amassed a Fort Knox of campaign money.

They had the encouraging precedent of the 2018 midterm elections. Above all, they had Trump’s ethical and administrative record to go after. All the raw materials were there for a crushing victory that would double as a purgative moment for the republic: a clean-up of sorts.

50-50 nation

Yes, a Californian running mate was never ideal – the election hinges on the Midwest and the southeast – but there was no clear alternative to Kamala Harris. As for his avoidance of mass political rallies, Biden could hardly run as a slayer of the coronavirus pandemic while holding them.

At this point in the search for unforced errors, the trail runs cold. Liberals are left to accept a deeper fact about the US. Far more than when the phrase started doing the rounds a generation ago, this is a 50-50 nation, or thereabouts.

There is almost no politician good enough to prise voters en masse from the opposing half of the electorate – the last to win more than 400 electoral college votes was George H W Bush, in 1988. And there is almost no deed or statement so bad as to cost a politician many votes from their own side. Whatever the pretensions of Washington’s architecture, politics is now better understood as a high-stakes version of team sport than as the discursive ideal of the ancients.

What is more, liberals cannot even bank on demographic change to tilt 50-50 into 60-40 in their favour. Trump’s apparent gains among voters of Latin-American ancestry (in Florida, for instance) are ominous for the left. A more diverse nation is not axiomatically a more progressive one. Liberalism will have to fight for its future, not assume it.

Half-a-loaf politics

The states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania may yet turn for Biden. Arizona has gone from red to blue without much of a transition phase, just as Virginia did in 2008. Yet even these achievements would have struck liberals as the bare minimum on the eve of the election. Nor do they amount to any kind of national resolution. A system in which neither party wins or loses very badly – nor hangs on to unified government for very long – should be all the more peaceful. In practice, this half-a-loaf politics merely deprives whoever is president of pan-national legitimacy.

Of course, even the narrowest win is still potentially world-changing. It is no more possible to be half-president than half-pregnant. If elected, Biden could unwind much of Trump’s foreign policy, regardless of which party controls the Senate. His election would be toasted in Nato headquarters and the chancelleries of most US allies. Executive power will also matter in the fight against the pandemic. And even a raising of the presidential tone is worth something.

No, if there is a sense of liberal dread today, it is less about the scotched dreams of a progressive realignment than Trump’s dismaying resilience. For four years, he has lived down to the Democrats’ direst expectations and remained electorally competitive. Not enough Americans regard him as a tyrant or a klutz, or care either way. Even if he loses, he has done well enough to remain the Republicans’ reference point in opposition and a plausible candidate in 2024.

And that is the best-case scenario for the cause of liberalism. Vote-counting, or a court ruling to stop it, may yet bring about the very worst one.– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020

@Fagan_ODowd

Trump’s apparent gains among voters of Latin-American ancestry (in Florida, for instance) are ominous for the left. A more diverse nation is not axiomatically a more progressive one. Liberalism will have to fight for its future, not assume it.

This apparent realisation that “Latin Americans” are not homogenous is unreal. A dearly departed poster who shall not be named fit into this bracket, just screaming racist and that Trump voters were racist in 2016, despite the figures there showing that he appealed more to minorities than previous Republican campaigns.

Headcount politics, much like identity politics, needs to go into the bin. That’s the real lesson of Trump and I hoped it would have been heeded after 2016 but was doubled down on with Trump gleefully playing the village idiot.

[Juno]

Since the LBJ landslide in 1964, Democrats have in the 14 Presidential elections largely opted for candidates from safe strongholds on the East Coast and mid west. Likes of John Kerry and Michael Dukakis (Massachussets), Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale (Minnesota), Hilary Clinton (Illinois native, New York resident), Al Gore (a creature of bureaucratic DC) all lost and between them picked up very states outside of the coasts and the usual suspects in the mid west. At least Sleepy Joe from Delaware is going to buck the trend stretching back to Kennedy of candidates from the East Coast losing.

Of the other three Democrats who have won since 1964 and made inroads in the south, two were southerners - Jimmy Carter (Georgia) and Bill Clinton (Arkansas) and then the unique brand of appeal of Barack Obama. If the Democrats stopped selecting east coast candidates, they might have a better chance of making gains in the south and elsewhere like Carter and Clinton did. Sleepy Joe will fall over the line here, but has really made heavy work of what was a tap in, to an open goal.

Unless he can win all of the remaining states, including North Carolina and Georgia, Sleepy Joe will be the first presidential winner since Carter in 1976 not to win a majority of the 50 states. With each of the 50 states providing 2 senators each, that is a factor in why the Democrats have failed to regain control of the Senate.

[Arthur]

I think a better way of putting is trump is divisive rather than racist. He openly tries to divide people and accentuate enemies within and without.

[TheUlteriorMotive]

I was reading a view that the Cuban vote in Florida is because of a campaign that taps into their fear of communism and Harris being painted as very left leaning. Sounds bizarre but nowadays anything seems plausible.

[Arthur]

That doesn’t sound bizarre at all I’d presume that’s exactly what it is? I’d say nobody hates communism more than the florida Cubans

[Rocko]

@Arthur

I think a better way of putting is trump is divisive rather than racist. He openly tries to divide people and accentuate enemies within and without.

It’s worse than that. Even if he’s not personally racist, which seems almost impossible, he has clearly and deliberately supported overt racists more than any other president in the recent past. He isn’t just polarising, he’s actively supporting extremists. And amid all the noise about the Democrats underperforming, it was this tolerance and support for extremism which seems to have been his undoing. And that’s a great thing.

[Tassotti]

Saw a good interview last night on ITV and that is exactly the case, the cubans in Florida hate commies like Biden

[Thomas_Brady]

Trump is still fighting here … it aint over yet.

[glenshane]

You’re right, he’s obviously divisive…deliberately so when it suits him. It’s from the same playbook as describing Republicans as racists, deplorable, fascists etc.

[glenshane]

@Rocko

he’s actively supporting extremists

You should watch this…it’s simplistic etc but it’s probably a good place for you to make a start. Perhaps it’s different when harris accuses biden of being racist and having supported extremists (though they weren’t really considered extremists when he was supporting them)

[Arthur]

I doubt you’ll get Biden saying any of those things during his term as president in the same way trump said the controversial things he said. Which will make a huge difference surely.

[glenshane]

@Arthur

Which will make a huge difference surely.

Possibly, but we were talking about the election

[Julio_Geordio]

I’ve given up following it lads. When are they going to call it?

[gaillimhmick]

It’ll have to be done by Jan 20th

[Batigol]

I’d say this is the end of racism in America now.

[myboyblue]

@Batigol

I’d say this is the end of racism in America now.

I think that would be a very hasty call to make. Probably best wait a bit and see what develops.

[Batigol]

Ah no the boogeyman is gone now. All his fans are racists too so they’ll have no one to support now.

The Dems will lockdown and tax their way into prosperity.

[myboyblue]

@Batigol

Ah no the boogeyman is gone now. All his fans are racists too so they’ll have no one to support now.

The Dems will lockdown and tax their way into prosperity.

I dont believe racism can be solved that easily. Its much more complex than you’re making out.

[Thomas_Brady]

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.