The themes, attendance and messages of the virtual convention of the Democratic Party are not well understood ideally concluded in Milwaukee on August 20th if you don't first have in mind some basic realities of American politics. The first and most important is that the electorate is divided into three blocks: a quarter secure Republicans, a third tenacious Democrats, the rest i.e. more than 40% independents, divided in turn into three groups, those leaning towards Republicans, those more sensitive to Democrats, and 15-20% pure independents , willing to switch without hesitation from one party to another.
It is between the independents that victory or defeat is at stake. And it is therefore clear that if the pure progressive faith unites an important wing of the party, too much progressivism causes the other side to lose votes. 206 counties for a total of over 7 million votes scattered across the country but concentrated in the Midwest west and northwest of Chicago they voted for Obama in 2008, again for Obama but fewer in 2012, and they voted for Trump in 2016, and a handful of these gave him the narrow victory in the crucial electoral vote.
The second to keep in mind among the numerous fundamental features is that in order to find a majority for the Democrats in the vote of the blue collar of white ethnicity, white working class vote we would say in European jargon, we must go back to Lyndon B. Johnson, back in 1964 the last democratic candidate to collect the majority of that vote. Since then white people who have stopped at a diploma of high school or not even that, they have not crossed the threshold of a university and they do manual or approved work, they vote with a clear Republican majority.
And it is among them, as well as among the constant ultra-nationalist current that has been fighting the "cosmopolitanism" of the American elites for at least a century, and among the ultra-religious Protestant and Catholic groups, that Trump has found his base. He didn't invent an electorate that already existed, he only cultivated and instigated it. Trump has thus reaped the extreme fruits of the now more than concluded end of the New Deal Coalition, that composite alliance put together in the 30s by Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats on three pillars, the unions of a vast area from Boston to New York to Chicago to St.Louis, the ethnic, European minorities of industrial America, and the rural vote of the South, essentially racist, but also populist, all held together byhostility to New York's financial elites, then all or almost republican.
In Europe we tend to forget that Roosevelt always had to appeal to the southerners in order to win, in the name of the rights of the little man, which however in the South and not only was racist. And indeed civil rights legislation did not move with Roosevelt, who hired black ushers and drivers as much as possible in Washington but thought about the vote of the South, and had to wait for Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and above all John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson knew very well, and he said it after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, that the South of him (he was a Texan) would leave the Democratic party.
Richard Nixon and above all Ronald Reagan drew great benefits, Bill Clinton recovered to the right by moving the party towards prudence on social issues, Obama was both a progressive triumph, the first African American in the White House, and a disappointment for those who expected more also as an attack on the establishment that Obama has instead embraced. And in the end Trump promising to flip the bird, to make the umbrella gesture to all of Washington, has capitalized on fears, resentments, suspicions. And racism.
“Racially motivated insecurity is a far more reliable predictor of support for Trump than any other factor, including economic anxiety,” says political scientist Alan Abramowitz of Emory University in Atlanta, one of the leading presidential experts. Trump is exploiting it to the max: "If you want violence and looting, vote Democrat", repeats these days after a summer of riots. This plugs the huge gaps, he hopes, opened by the inadequate response to the pandemic and the resulting economic collapse.
The match for November 3, 2020 is still open and, despite the polls that favor Biden but today a little less than yesterday, rather uncertain. The economy will weigh, whether there will be a clear recovery in October or not; a possible resurgence of the virus will weigh; TV debates will count for a lot, more than usual. It is very probable that everything will end in the points, as in 2016. Few had seen in time then that Trump had real chances, given the dynamics of the electorate. Today perhaps he has less, due to the pandemic, the collapse of the economy, and thanks to his disappointing performance in the White House. Biden can do it, even at 77.
But it is by no means to be taken for granted. Trump's base, built around the support of about 60% of the non-college-educated whites, does not crumble, even if it shows interesting sagging that could make a difference in various counties. However, it is a base in clear numerical decline, down from 52% of voters in 2004 to just over 40% today. There is also the weakening of Trump among the college-educated, especially women. Republicans, who averaged about 1976% of the white vote from 2016 to 55 versus about 39% for Democrats, need the white vote more and more, and Democrats less and less, given population dynamics.
That of the democratic convention was another America, one of openness and inclusion, without fear of the end of the numerical supremacy of the whites, which according to official statistical forecasts they will no longer be the majority of Americans by the year 2044. It is a model that aims to include in the national culture, essentially white and European in the fundamental principles of the socio-political sphere, millions and millions of people of other colors who are and want to be Americans like everyone else.
It is a vision of the future. Trump, like many supporters of him, confuses future and past. The democratic convention she therefore moved with caution on the complex terrain of a party that must keep together progressives who have never been so assertive as today, sometimes too much, and moderates, acquiring consensus also on this second front. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the hyper-progressive congresswoman from New York, had only one minute to speak, and she didn't even name Biden, for her a crypto-conservative.
As on other occasions in the past, the convention is played on the left to celebrate party unity and avoid escapes and absenteeism, while the decisive part of the electoral campaign, September and October, is played more to the right to recover as many votes as possible. It will be needed. The game is huge, fear is a spring to use to shake the undecided and Obama has tried to move everyone by skimming the boundaries of a possible defeat. For America, much will depend on this vote. And also for the world, Europe in the front row.
Trump doesn't know what he wants, except to squeeze as many votes as possible from the illusions of an electorate ignorant of history and convinced that America alone would be a paradise and that taking care of the world has only brought trouble. For this reason, the manifesto published on August 21 by 70 former protagonists of diplomacy, defense and security services, all Republicans, and which invites you to vote for Biden and to send home a Trump "inadequate for the presidential role", he hit the mark. But only for those who want to read it. For others, it will be further proof that the elite are treacherous and only Trump can lead the country. Where?
