Americans vote on November 3rd to decide if Donald Trump deserves another four years and if the most recent of the various American populist seasons, embodied by the billionaire real estate developer, proceeds or derails. Or rather, November 3 ends the long consultation that, between votes in polling stations on November 3, early votes in pre-polling stations allowed in 39 states plus the federal district of Washington, votes by mail (absentee ballot), will have seen an exceptional number of voters, well above the four-year average of about 100 million voters for the last 50 years, and far more than the 138 million four years ago.
But it will take time, much longer than usual, to find out how it turned out. The signals that shortly after the closure of the last polling stations on the Pacific were poured into the media system in the past and sometimes made it possible to indicate the almost certain winner not long after midnight on the American east coast, this year will often be delayed. No one rules out the possibility that we have to wait for the afternoon of 4 November, for example. 2020 is the year of records for the number of voters, for the use of postal voting exploded and more or less quadrupled as an antidote to queues at polling stations in times of pandemic, for high early voting at polling stations where possible; in total more than half of the probable very many voters had already expressed themselves a week before November 3, even if it will be known how only after November 3.
Perhaps the historical record of 1908 will be broken as the ratio between entitled parties and effective voters. That too was a season of very strong populist passions, and that election too was held on November 3rd. William Jennings Bryan, the symbol of American populism at the turn of the century, ran for the third time as a Democratic candidate and as usual received the full vote of the populist and racist and then passionately Democratic Solid South (the "rights of states" against Washington ) and was defeated a third time, by Republican William Howard Taft as before, twice, by Republican William McKinley. Never was the mobilization greater, farmers above all against railways, steel, coal and oil, and against Wall Street.
Today three themes dominate:
- a referendum on Trump and its national populist season;
- worries about the economy;
- e the disaster of the pandemic too underestimated by the president.
The fact that the elderly and somewhat senile Joe Biden is a formidable challenger signals that the New York real estate developer's position has not strengthened in recent years. Having made himself known much better than before did him no good, in the eyes of many Americans. Of how many? It will take patience to get the verdict. Slowing everything down are the technical aspects of a vote that is federal in meaning but state, 50 different state votes adding up, like rules and procedures.
For example, if one could soon have sufficiently large data on two key states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania it would be possible to locate the almost certain winner well before American dawn on November 4th. Ohio is the state that always votes with the winner and in 31 elections, since 1896, it has failed only twice, in 1944 and in 1960; more Republican than Democrat for many decades, he offers Biden some hope this time around. If Trump loses it, it is a bad sign for him. It would be even more useful to know in the usual times of the past, about an hour after the polls on the Pacific close, i.e. about an hour after midnight in New York, who won Pennsylvania, with its 20 votes in theelectoral college (they are equal, as elsewhere, to the sum of deputies that the state sends to the federal Congress plus the two senators). Pennsylvania with about 40 votes ahead, Wisconsin and Michigan with much fewer allowed Trump's victory in the system four years ago for a tiny total differential of 77 votes.electoral college.
But here comes the conjunction between the abnormal mass of votes by mail and the rules. While 22 states can do the preprocessing, prepare postal votes for optical reading as they arrive starting in September and 25 others can still anticipate the operation by a few weeks or days, in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin everything starts only on the morning of November 3, as in Alabama and Missouri, which count for little as a signal because they are certainly Republican. But that's not enough. By law, Pennsylvania also has to count postal votes received up to November 6, provided they are sent by the 3rd. We could make up again as an owl state with Ohio, where the preprocessing it takes place almost a month before the vote; but Ohio has to wait for the mail until November 13th. Pennsylvania and Ohio are therefore out of the game as lookouts in the fog, in this year of massive postal voting. Michigan and Wisconsin would be almost as useful as coquettish states, but the former only opens postal votes on November 2, and the latter on the 3rd, and they're unlikely to get their response before dawn this year.
However, for those wishing to observe History on the march, staying up late and very small hours and following everything, there is still a good opportunity with Florida, which went to Trump in 2016 for 100 thousand votes out of 9 million voters and is contestable this year, as well as Arizona, whose data, however, arrive later due to time zone issues. If Biden snatches Florida it's a huge blow for the Republicans, if Trump keeps Florida and then Arizona it's a low blow for Biden, which in any case would still have an alternative path to the 270 electoral votes that the president makes, out of a total of 538, while having lost those two states, Trump has practically none left.
We must not forget then the “red mirage” effect or red mirage, with the color symbol of the Republicans, which could weigh not on the final results, but on the after-vote climate, making it at least pyrotechnic with Trump on the scene. The "red mirage" would be the illusion of the 3rd night and maybe even the 4th that in numerous counties and in some states the Republicans have won for the simple fact that the Republicans, it is ascertained, vote much less by mail and much more at polling stations , and thus their votes would be counted first in numerous states.
Not all pollsters and political scientists agree, indeed, but Hawkfish, an analysis company created by former New York mayor and former Democratic pretender Michael Bloomberg, estimates that the "red mirage" effect could allow Trump to attribute himself , on the morning of the 4th for example, up to 408 electoral votes, a huge victory, only to see defeat with the arrival of all the postal votes. Because of this Trump has spoken at length about the risks of often “rigged” postal voting, which he debunked in 2017 from a statistical analysis of Brennan Center for Justice at the Law School of New York University, which indicates between 0,00004% and 0,0009% of the votes the reality of attempted fraud by mail.
Technical and procedural issues will therefore have their way, on November 3 and after. In any case, the political and historical reality will be that of a response, a yes or a no, to a presidency that has taken up again and with an unprecedented style, a path already attempted in other eras by the American polis against the elites and in the name of human rights. and of the wisdom of commonman, the ultimate hero of the American myth. At the centre, even more than the singular personality of Donald John Trump, is the concept of the role of the federal state in the life of the country, and there is the concept of a foreign policy that is not just "business" as they used to say a century ago, declaring that “the business of America is business”.
As if everything moved in a vacuum, from one business contract to another. Trump won in 2016 because he promised to kick temple merchants, bureaucrats and the like, to drive them out as Barack Obama had promised and had not done, already a president elected in a semi-populist key and who behaved like a technocrat. Trump was liked by many, especially in the Midwest, because he was capable of flip the bird, to make the umbrella gesture to those in Washington. And to agree with the commonman.
had enough? Have you had enough? Maybe. The true or presumed anti-elite that commands soon becomes an elite. We go to the final phase of the vote with a Biden in good shape and a Trump in difficulty, but not yet beaten. The pandemic could play a heavy role and certainly not in favor of Trump. For us, faced with a President who would like to humiliate and dismember to the objective advantage of his friend Putin that Europe which his predecessors have long judged an indispensable partner in a difficult world, the preference would seem obligatory.
Read also:
US elections: fake news and conspiracy syndrome
Trump-Biden, the challenge is on fiscal policy
