US elections, Biden in the lead but independents are 40%

At the end of June, no one can say how Americans will vote in four months. One can bet, but the gamble only becomes reasonable at the end of the summer when most of the independent voters, i.e. neither Republicans nor declared Democrats, will have decided which side to take. Independents, 40% of the electorate, are by far the largest bloc, compared to 25-28% of Republicans and about 30% of Democrats. The independents are then divided, in the polls, between potentially Republicans and potentially Democrats, the latter currently on the rise, and this figure also confirms that, four months after the vote, the Democratic candidate Joe Biden, at almost 78 years of age, seems have the best opportunities.   

After two presidents who have bet everything on the promise of change, Barack Obama before and Donald Trump after, the first often bringing only progressive changes on the surface and the second above all confusion, a “grandfather” president could have his cards to play. Ultimately promising only wisdom, and perhaps for only one mandate given that the second would find him 82 years old at the time of the possible second inauguration.   

If you look at the polls, Biden is currently winning, and by a good margin. The polls have failed several times however, saying for example up to the last in 1980 that Jimmy Carter would have crushed Ronald Reagan and that in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have definitely won over Donald Trump. Also giving Biden the edge are many analyzes of local voting intentions in states that are likely to determine the final result, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and a few others. The economy could make a big difference, because if the post-pandemic recovery is strong and above all rapid, as some initial data on employment and the leap in retail sales could indicate, Trump will certainly reap the benefits. 

Trump's key advantage is that he is the outgoing president, always one card more than the challenger, and various negative factors are needed to cancel it. There are negative factors and the vote is certainly a referendum on Trump, the most controversial and anomalous of the presidents of the last century. The pandemic, which sees the United States among the worst affected after so many presidential assurances of perfect reaction capacity, and the socio-racial unrest following the death at the hands of the police of the African American George Floyd equally damage it, because it is absolutely unable to present himself as the man who knows how to overcome divisions. He is the man who arrived at the White House exacerbating divisions, if anything.

And behind his slogan of America first there is an increasingly void of ideas and policies. The fight against immigration and the fight against imports are the maximum perspective that Trump has been able to give to the country, so far, and above all for trade policies with poor results. The external deficit does not budge, from 550 billion in 2017 to 627 in 18 to then drop to 616 in 2019, a decline proclaimed as a turning point by Trump but prematurely, because similar annual variations have already occurred in very recent years, without affecting the underlying trend of an excess of imports, or a shortage of exports.

There are many arguments that illustrate Trump's inadequacy, the latest in chronological order the advances coming from the book of the former national security adviser John Bolton, the superhawk who walked out of the White House by slamming the door in October 2019 after a year and a half of difficult coexistence. The president would be unprepared and unable to carefully use the reports that are prepared for him, superficial, instinctive, poorly esteemed by his closest collaborators, attentive only to one issue, that of his own re-election. Indeed, a defeat in November would prove that Donald Trump he is not the superman he thinks he is. 

As Europeans we can only wish for now the defeat of a man who hates Europe. Maybe there will be defeat. Trump was perhaps more likely to be elected in 2016, though few noticed it, than he is to be re-elected now. Four years ago, both the difficulty of having three administrations of the same color in succession and the weaknesses of Hillary Clinton worked in his favor, and he prevailed because enough Americans wanted someone to really "change" Washington, with a populist attitude. AND Trump came up with a populist. It's unclear to what extent this was a successful show. 

As always when judgment is uncertain, it helps to remember the big picture and underlying trends. With a little optimism there are those, like Robert Sean Willentz on Rolling Stones, sees Trump in a deep crisis and considers it the terminal phase of a very long season that began with the anti-Vietnam riots of 1968 and the victory that year of Richard Nixon, i.e. of the Republican right. Through various seasons, relaunched by Ronald Reagan, that right then came to radicalization in the 90s, after the anomalous victory in '92 (anomalous compared to the season and thanks to a third candidate who split the conservative vote) of a Bill Clinton who made the Democrats a post-progressive party.  

Bush junior, and above all his deputy Dick Cheney radicalized the Republicans even more, changing the DNA of the old party. Trump 2016 completed the work, arriving at thedeclared hypernationalism and neo-isolationism. With what real advantages, it can be added, for a superpower that has become such thanks to deep global alliances and the liberalism of the markets - these are the two pillars of the monetary supremacy of the dollar - remains to be seen. 

They are great scenarios. More down to earth, if we look at the electoral behavior that determined four years ago Trump's victory by just 80 votes but well distributed, we find interesting data. As is well known, the current president lost widely in the popular vote, on a national scale, but he won more electoral votes, which in the American system are decisive because these, and not directly the choice of the voters, indicate the president; each state has as many electoral votes as there are deputies in the Washington House plus the two senators each state has, and these votes almost everywhere go as a block to whoever gets the most votes state by state, and it is the electoral votes that elect the president, not the popular ones directly.  

Trump arrived at the White House because a handful of colleges crucial to the conquest of the electoral votes of the Midwest did what in 2016 did 206 counties (out of a national total of 3.143) that had voted Obama in 2008 and 2012 often by 10-15% margins the first time, slightly less the second time, and then voted for Trump by 5-8% margins in 2016. It happened almost everywhere but not on the Pacific coast and it happened especially widespread in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio. What has historically been considered the county most sympathetic to national trends, Vigo in southern Indiana, went from 16% in favor of Obama in 2008 to 0,86 for Obama in 2012 to 15% for Trump in 2016 . 

Above all, to oust Trump it is necessary that these voters, essentially from the Midwest, in sufficient numbers change their minds. They don't read Rolling Stones, nor the memoirs of John Bolton. They go by nose. Of course, if they are economically dissatisfied and see a future that is too uncertain, it weighs heavily. Trump's crudeness doesn't scare them. Rather, the ineffectiveness of his words disaffects them. He may be that a subdued election campaign by Biden, which is seen as little as possible, works. Trump has spoken and shown up too much.  

Racial tension hurts Trump. Provided that the requests of those who ask for more controls and less powers for the police do not exceed a certain limit, beyond which they would act as glue and stimulus for potential voters of a Trump who is all "law and order". We must not forget that the United States is a violent country, where not only the police often go too far, and that in Chicago on the last weekend of May there were 28 homicides, mostly among African Americans, a record that hadn't been broken for 60 years.