The American primary season has created the image of a Donald Trump winner. In Europe you see crowds cheering for him on TV, you see a Biden from the octogenarian pace and we often conclude that the game is over. But we are in April, early April, and we will only be able to talk about the games being done in September, perhaps, for a vote set for November 5th. The result will most likely be a close call, with the outcome determined by a handful of votes, between 50 thousand and 200 thousand popular votes, but in the right states, bringing the "electoral votes" of each of these three or five-six states given to the winner. The difference in popular votes could be millions, but it could win even those who have taken many fewer on a national scale, as long as they have secured, even if for a very short time, that handful of states in the balance.
The puzzle of "electoral votes": how US elections work
As is known, in the United States for presidential elections there are two types of votes, the popular ones, one man one vote, and the so-called electoral votes or "electoral votes", which summarize the choices state by state, are determined by popular votes and generally go to whoever has the majority in that state. It's not a single national election, but it's 50 votes state by state, even if the candidate is the same everywhere. The rule is not to win by a landslide, but to win even by a few votes in as many states as possible. Naturally, the most populous have more "electoral votes", but there is no point in winning by a landslide to get them, out of 15 million voters 7,6 million votes are enough and the other 7,4 are useless. Each state has as many "electoral votes" as the sum of the two senators and deputies it sends to Washington. California therefore has 2+53 i.e. 55 "electoral votes" and Wyoming 2+1 i.e. 3. The number of deputies obviously depends on the number of residents.
The system dates back to the origins of the Republic and has two main objectives. Prevent only the most populous areas from deciding, completely nullifying the will of the states with fewer inhabitants, and create a two-stage system to make the rise of a demagogue who knew how to conquer the crowds less easy. These vote, but in the end it is others who make it happen will expressed by the people. The drawbacks of the system are that less populous areas have electoral power in excess of their demographic weight. And that the rise of a demagogue is not entirely averted, as the case of Donald Trump suggests. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, have for decades adopted a perhaps better system, which assigns to those with the most votes in the state only the two "electorals" corresponding to the two senators, and the others on the basis of the results in each of the constituencies for the House of Representatives. Washington. So far the other 48 states have not followed suit.
Trump versus Biden: The battle for electoral votes in 2016 and 2020
in 2016 Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, who had 2,5 million more popular votes than him, thanks to 44 thousand more popular votes in Pennsylvania, 11 thousand in Michigan and 23 thousand in Wisconsin, which brought him 66 "electoral votes" in the Electoral College allowing him to reach 304 , with the victory bar set at 270 and Hillary Clinton stuck at 234. In 2020 similar results guaranteed six states Joe Biden giving him a “74 electoral vote” majority in the Electoral College; in particular, 44 thousand votes between Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin prevented it from ending in a tie, 269 each in the Electoral College, and from everything being decided in the end with a vote of the federal House.
In 2020 the year of large turnout 159 million Americans voted out of 240 million eligible voters. According to the latest annual Gallup analysis of party orientation, 27% identify as Republicans and a similar number as Democrats, while 43% define themselves as independents. Of these, 45% say they are closer to the Republicans and 43% to the Democrats. Others specific polls they say that 20% or a little less of Republicans do not like Trump and half of these will never vote for him, some did not do so already in 2016 and others will no longer do so after 2016-2020.
Trump: leading in the polls, but with the threat of post-election tensions
Polls are in now in favor of Trump, but not in a determining world. The site Real Clear Politics, which analyzes polls and also has its own editorial team and has long been decidedly unbalanced in favor of Trump, finds among the dozens of analyzes an average that assigns Trump 46,5% of the choices to Biden 45,5 ,219. In the Electoral College, 215 to Trump and 104 to Biden, and XNUMX votes in the balance too uncertain to assign, for now.
Trump, as we know very well, shouted and continues to shout atcheat for 2020, and he has already put his hand forward by saying that the Democrats could cheat in 2024 too. He may seem strange after no court, out of around ninety legal cases on alleged fraud, has ruled in his favor. But Trump continues to say that the 2020 vote won by Joe Biden was a scam. He adds, even in these hours, that whoever gave the assault on Congress where 6 January 2021 Biden's victory was being ratified in an attempt to prevent it, he is "a hero" and "a patriot", a "hostage" that he, Trump, will absolve from all guilt as soon as he is re-elected. They were condemned 750, many with some imprisonment, from a few weeks to 22 years, for violent sedition. But true Trumpians call them "political prisoners". And every now and then Trump adds threateningly that if he doesn't win next November it will be "a tragedy" for the country.
There are serious institutional consequences which, however, American Supreme Court, with three judges appointed by Trump and six out of nine, in total, of Republican orientation, does not seem to want to address it, disregarding its mandate.
Trump, Biden and the Supreme Court: the tug-of-war that defines an era
The maximum was reached on March 4, when the Court said unanimously, and there were no particular objections to this, that it State of Colorado he could not remove the name of Trump From lists for the Republican primaries having betrayed the Constitution by instigating the assault on Congress. A single state cannot do this. But the Court went much further: it said, by majority, that paragraph 3 of the 14th amendment to the Constitution, on the insurrection of a popularly elected person, cannot be applied in the case of a President until Congress has decided the procedures. The amendment has existed since 1868. The Court then scheduled the examination of the immunity that Trump claims for his acts as president, January 6, 2001 in the lead, on the last possible day of the work calendar, an examination requested both by Trump and by the federal magistrates investigating him. There is a strong risk that the verdict will arrive well after November 5th. There judicial strategy followed by Trump in this and other proceedings he is undergoing is always that of postponement, and the Court has adapted.
But the Court proved itself wrong a few days later when, on March 18, it refused to accept the appeal di Couy Griffin, the leader of the Cowboys for Trump, who was in Washington on January 6, 2001 and who was dismissed from his role as county assessor by a New Mexico magistrate in New Mexico because he was guilty of insurrection (paragraph 3 above) and therefore unworthy of holding a public office. There Supreme Court has therefore confirmed the sentence, which is for life. “We all know this is against the law,” Griffin's lawyer, Peter Ticktin, couldn't help but say, “now that the Court has decided the Trump case and the attempt to exclude him from voting in Colorado.” Damage can come to Trump, and has already come, from other ongoing legal proceedings. But the supreme federal judiciary will not be the one to stop him.
The crucial vote for the future of democracy
Il outcome electoral it depends on how many decide that all this is not worthy of a great democracy. There are also many other considerations, from trust or distrust in Biden, to his venerable age, 82 years old on November 20th, to many others. But a judgment on Trump will be crucial, given that the man on the one hand promises enormous changes (in his first term he mostly navigated, erratically, by sight), and on the other he is decidedly anomalous as a democratic leader, and narcissistic to the point of paroxysm.
Trump and neo-isolationism: a new political era?
For Europeans, and not only, there is also the neo-isolationism that Trump rides very well, a karst current of American politics that is over a century old (congenital, moreover, at the birth of the country), and has re-emerged in force in the last 20 years. It's a "let's mind our own business" that seems like an escape into a world that doesn't exist and didn't even exist in the past, when America, now powerful, was twice involved in a great European and world war .
One of Trump's many supporters, a Cleveland lawyer by name Paul F. Petrick, prolific author of comments on various papers in the pro-Trump galaxy, wrote in recent days that after Roosevelt's New Deal, and Truman's Fair Deal, there is Trump's Art of the Deal, from the title of a well-known book signed by Trump, written by others, on how to be rich and powerful. “It consists in the total rejection of the bipartisan consensus on immigration, trade and foreign policy, and in offering Americans what should have been offered after victory in the Cold War: a Government in the name of national interests.” Nothing more vague. Already in 2016 Garrison Keilor, a well-known radio anchorman from Minnesota who played himself in Robert Altman's latest film, released in Italy as Radio America and in the original A prairie home companion, wrote a satirical article on Trump for the Chicago Tribune, title: “When all this is over, you won't have had anything you want.”
