Ribeirão Preto, SP – (Opinion) My fellow gringo Peter Rosenwald has put forward the case for returning the U.S. to something of a semblance of democracy – elect Joe Biden president. He begins by saying that a “Trump victory in the US presidential elections … is too awful to contemplate.”
But contemplate we must: as St. Paul said (I Cor 13:12): “For now we see as through a glass, darkly.” If the polls – our election-viewing glasses – are now dark, as Trump maintains, he sees many paths to victory.
The path of least resistance runs through the U.S. Electoral College, an 18th century triumph of geography over democracy, which – twice in the 21st century – has produced a Republican president who received fewer popular votes than the defeated Democratic candidate did.
The Electoral College (EC) counts votes cast by representatives of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The number of each state’s EC votes is the sum of its congressional delegations. The EC total is 538 votes, meaning a majority requires 270 votes.
The second path is economics. At the end of 2019, most Americans felt they were better off than in 2016, as Trump’s campaign ceaselessly reminds them. One year ago, the U.S. economy had achieved its holy grail: low inflation and low unemployment. The stock market was bullish; the cuts in taxes and red tape were popular. Were it not for the Covid-19 disaster, Trump might have won re-election easily.
The third path lies through the traditional American heartland – those states lying between the Appalachians and the Rockies, all too often disparaged by coastal elites as “flyover country”. Trump’s “America First” and “MAGA” themes play well in Peoria, as does his China bashing. Trump’s abhorrence of immigrants who are not as white as his own trophy wife, easily finds an echo among “middle Americans”.
Trump’s fourth path simply ignores Biden’s personality. Biden projects the image of being a nice guy, a decent human being. Trump knows (and decisively proved in 2016) that Americans simply do not elect nice guy presidents – think Tricky Dick Nixon and Slick Willy Clinton. The last “nice guy” US President was Jimmy Carter, solidly trounced by Ronald Reagan when attempting re-election.
The darkest path, which Trump has navigated extremely skillfully, is America’s deeply ingrained systemic racism. A majority of Americans, particularly those in the heartland, do not believe that Black Lives Matter.
Citing his valid measures supporting black enterprises and traditional black colleges, Trump then calls all BLM protestors “vandals” and “thugs”, and promises “law and order” to clamp down on the “carnage” he says will move, under Biden, from America’s cities into their suburbs. He shamelessly begs “suburban housewives” to love him, as he vows never to let low-income housing developments (code for black or brown people) encroach on their lily-white lawns.
Finally, in Trump’s dark vision, the polls that paint a rosy picture for Biden are, once again, badly wrong. Although polls claim to have changed their methodology to correct the mistakes of 2016, where they grossly underestimated Trump’s numbers, legions of diehard Trump supporters “disappear” from most polls by refusing to participate in any, other than those Trump’s campaign controls.
All the above paths lead Trump back to victory in the Electoral College. Biden arguably lost crucial eastern swing states Pennsylvania (20 EC votes) and Ohio (18) when he said he would end fracking. Trump’s paths also allow him to carry all four crucial southern swing states – Texas (38), Florida (29), Georgia (16) and North Carolina (15) – despite polls showing Biden leading or even in some of these.
If Trump is right, Biden can only win an Electoral College majority by conquering, in addition to the states where he is far ahead, three western swing states: Minnesota (10), Arizona (11) and Nevada (6), where recent polls show his lead diminishing.
Geography counts here, too. Trump’s vision assumes that masses of discouraged Biden voters in the west, after watching as the early returns from easterly time zones project Trump victories, will bow to the inevitable and fail to get out and vote for their candidate.
Is Trump’s dark vision right? We hope not, but we worry.