How did Biden win?

Donald Trump is not the only American president in recent American political history who has not been elected for a second term.

Jimmy Carter in the 1980s and George Bush in the 1990s could not avail a second tenure because of their failure on the foreign policy front. American voters felt that Trump has failed them on both accounts. Observing the US presidential election in 2020, one notices a striking contrast between the past two presidents who lost elections mainly because of domestic reactions to their foreign policies. In this election cycle, a large number of voters and both the candidates touched very little on foreign policies.

The single most important issue on the ballot was Trump himself, his heated tweets, wavering policies and erratic and hostile conduct. The last four years were too much for the American public and media to absorb and reconcile with. Analysts believe that Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was the core reason for his defeat, but the losses his party suffered in the last four years, despite a growing economy and jobs, happened way before the pandemic that only began to impact people from March 2020 onwards.

The anti-Trump wave had already begun. In key battleground states Trump’s Republican Party had already lost major positions in Wisconsin, Michigan, Louisiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Arizona. In 2018, the Republicans lost the House to the Democrats, paving the way not only for moderate democrats but even for the progressive left.

In terms of net electoral gains for the progressive left, Trump’s four years in office were the best in the last quarter of the century. The left, inspired by Bernie Sanders’ two aborted presidential campaigns, fired up young activists who replaced several moderate democrats in the House. The New Green Deal program serves like a uniting manifesto for progressives in contemporary American politics.

The Republican Party’s alignment with working class white voters will not last long as no GOP candidate in the last 25 years has ever presented a healthcare program. The unending hardships of the white working class were wrongly associated with Trump’s rhetoric on loss of manufacturing and fossil fuel jobs, and with the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). It is true global free trade has badly hurt workers in America as companies relocated their manufacturing plants.

From the outset of this election, it was clear that Trump would not win if he lost any of the three states where he wanted to dismantle the blue wall. Trump carried three states which have been viewed as the Democratic Blue Wall – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – with a margin of 73,000 votes in 2016; he lost these in 2020 mainly because of an increase in voter turnout among African Americans in urban counties in Milwaukee, Detroit and Harrisburg and Philadelphia.

The current votes have been compared with the last two elections when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were the contestants. Biden won all these three states because of a far higher turnout in these counties. Historically, higher turnout favours Democrats. In this election, the Associated Press reported 15 percent new voters. Biden won Arizona because of the Hispanic vote.

Georgia, a traditional Republican state has been going through demographic changes; in the past 25 years two in three people who moved to this state have been non-white. Atlanta, the largest urban center in the state has 57 percent total eligible votes, and urban voters tend to vote for the Democratic Party. Trump won this state in 2016 with a margin of 231,000 votes; two years later Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams lost it with a margin of only 50,000 votes. The state has added 250,000 new Hispanic votes. Mike Bloomberg channeled millions of dollars to pay court fines of former felons who were rendered ineligible because of state laws, what is called vote suppression among Blacks.

The net outcome of these changes is that the Republican Senate candidates could not win 50 percent of the vote and both have gone into runoff elections, now scheduled for January 5, 2021. These two Senate seats will determine the majority in the Senate. Georgia is one of the few states that have not been called for any candidates yet because the election has been too close. Biden is leading with a thin margin and after a possible vote recount he is likely to win the state. All three states in question due to delayed results – Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina – are led by Republican governors, so how does the question of voter fraud and election stealing arise?

The US Supreme Court in its recent ruling concerning Pennsylvania clearly accepted the sovereign right of states to set up rules for voting and counting process, there won’t be a legal case to question that authority. Trump’s threat of lawsuits against states will not produce any results for him. States have different regulations on vote count. For example, in Florida mail-in votes are counted first before in-person votes; because of that reason Joe Biden was leading in early results. On the contrary in Pennsylvania, in-person votes are counted first and mail-in and absentee votes later. These were unprecedented elections; 102 million people voted early before Election Day.

Amid the pandemic and an economy under severe stress, Biden will be under serious burden to delivery. Eleven million Americans are out of job, small businesses in big cities have been wiped out. If Democrats fail to win majority in the Senate, Biden and Harris will not be able to carry out a policy change effect. The sigh of relief from Trump’s departure will be short-lived; the ‘dark-winter’ that Biden fears will most likely remain there for the first half of 2021.

Email: mush.rajpar@gmail.com

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