Grassroots battle for the leadership of free world

And the winner is … grassroots US democracy; the people who express their view quietly where it matters, at the ballot box. The losers, as in 2016, are the pollsters, naive commentators who take them at face value and most of the so-called progressive Twitterati. Regardless of who prevails when the last ballots are counted or recounted — and an extraordinary 11th-hour twist has made that problematic — the red and blue chequerboard across the US is not what the elites and chattering classes predicted or wanted. The deplorables get a vote, too. Progressive ideology and empty woke symbolism took a big hit.

For months almost every poll put Democrat challenger Joe Biden 10 to 12 points ahead of President Donald Trump. In recent days pundits said the race had tightened in the battleground states, but only slightly. The contest, most insisted, was Mr Biden’s to lose; he was expected to win the popular vote, just as Hillary Clinton did against Mr Trump, by a margin of three million votes. Wiser heads, such as Cameron Stewart and Greg Sheridan, knew Mr Trump was always in striking distance and had a pathway to re-election. And on Wednesday night, amid seesawing uncertainty about who would claim the 270 electoral college votes to win, Mr Trump had more than held his own in most state races. This represents a remarkable achievement by Mr Trump after being written off by most of the hostile US media, which yet again misread the popular vote. Some even claimed Mr Biden would win in a landslide.

The first clue that pundits had got it wrong came early in the count. CNN, often at loggerheads with the Trump administration, released an exit poll that made it clear that the idea that Mr Trump was doomed to lose mainly because of his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic was overstated. More than one in three voters emerging from the booths rated the economy their No 1 concern. As on this side of the Pacific, what mattered to them were job security, taxes, economic opportunity and cheap energy. Mr Biden’s pledge to abolish the oil and gas industries was a colossal blunder. The other issues that rated in the CNN exit poll were racial equality (21 per cent), the pandemic (18 per cent); crime and safety (11 per cent) and healthcare (11 per cent). Mr Biden over-egged COVID-19, serious as it is, and the threat he claimed Mr Trump posed to Obamacare.

Those issues reflected a Reuters survey last month in which 56 per cent of Americans, asked whether they were better off than when Mr Trump was elected in 2016, answered yes. One message in the results is that many Americans want government and the public to work through the pandemic in a way that does not see their economies locked down and jobs lost. Mr Trump’s spirit in firing up his base in the final days of the campaign, tirelessly traversing key states to address enthusiastic crowds, made a difference. Mr Biden, in contrast, mostly stayed home in Delaware, appearing in public only occasionally, heavily masked to convey the impression that, unlike the cavalier Mr Trump, he was taking COVID-19 seriously. As in 2016, the result suggests that, questioned by mainstream pollsters, some citizens are disinclined to voice their voting intentions. Mainstream commentators also have given Mr Trump little if any credit for delivering on his promises. Honouring his pledge to appoint well-qualified conservative justices such as Amy Coney Barrett, for example, drew out the powerful pro-life constituency.

As the race came down to the wire on Wednesday night, Australian time, it ground to a worrying halt, unfortunately, creating confusion and anxiety after what had appeared to be a smooth process. At that stage, the precautions to prevent violence, such as boarding up building fronts, appeared to have been unnecessary. At the end of a long day, both Mr Trump and Mr Biden insisted they had a pathway to the 270 votes they needed to take the Oval Office. Fair enough. It is very close.

All the votes need to be counted, and recounted where necessary, as soon as possible. Much hinges on final results in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Mr Trump is ahead in all three. But more than 100 million ballots cast before the election appear to favour the Democrats. And a US Supreme Court ruling has stipulated counting in Pennsylvania can go on until the weekend.

In a further complicating twist, Mr Trump announced at the 11th hour that he was going to the Supreme Court to stop counting any votes yet to arrive at election centres. He labelled the pending results a “major fraud”. Hours after the polls had closed the President said: “We want all voting to stop … We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, OK?”

For the sake of the integrity of the US political system and the strength of the nation’s boisterous, rigorous democracy, any doubts must be cleared up — transparently and as soon as possible. As Paul Kelly writes on Thursday, it is vital the election is settled on the count, not in the courts. The right to vote, as Vice-President Mike Pence said, has been “at the centre of our democracy since the founding of this nation”. It must be protected. So the US — and the world — watches and waits.