The US presidential election is over, but the theatre continues. Commentators have huffed and puffed that Trump’s stubborn refusal to concede has rocked democratic principles to their core. There is dissent and outrage but for Americans who have opted not to buy a ticket on the crazy train, the wash-up has been highly amusing.
This week’s highlight was a TV interview with now you see her now you don’t member of the Trump legal team, Sidney Powell who suggested zombie Hugo Chavez in cahoots with the CIA had bribed the Republican Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp (a Trump acolyte), and his Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to install Dominion voting machines and shift votes from one side to the other.
Powell sent packing
This was a view so nutty that Lord of the Fagales, Rudy Giuliani sent Powell packing from the Trump legal team.
Powell’s performance made Giuliani’s presser at the Four Seasons in Philly two weeks back (not the hotel but the landscaping business over the road from the crematorium, next to the dildo shop) look like the Gettysburg Address.
If you’re too crazy to sit in the same room as Rudy, maybe the only room you should sit in has mattresses strapped to the walls.
Where to next? Aliens from beyond the moon gathering up Nevada ballots with their powerful mandibles. It’s anyone’s guess.
There may not be a concession from Trump all the way to the inauguration on January 20. It doesn’t matter. It won’t change the result or the margin.
The swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia have all certified their counts. Joe Biden has won 306 electoral college votes, Donald Trump 232, almost a mirror image of the 2016 result.
The run for 2020
The prevailing wisdom is Trump will shortly announce his candidacy for the 2024 election. He may well do so and start MAGA rallies almost immediately. Some of the hand wringers in the US media believe this will amount to an alt-government.
I am not convinced Trump will start running almost immediately. Four years is a long time to be holding rallies. They are expensive and drain campaign finances. There may well be benefits, cash coming through the door through donations but at some point the river will run dry. Trump may not run at all in 2024. We’ll know soon enough.
The two Senate run-off elections in Georgia which will determine the make up of the Senate will keep the post-election hysteria bubbling along until the jury returns on January 5. Beyond that campaign fatigue for voters and candidates alike is likely to set in.
Bitter divisions
The US remains bitterly divided. The election merely confirmed that. If this was a referendum on Trump, the people spoke in volume.
But there is more to it than that and as is so often the case, the good news has been largely ignored by the media. Rather than the gnashing of teeth over the future of democracy in the US, Americans should be celebrating an embrace of it and of a rediscovered power at the ballot box.
Over much of the last half century, voter turnout has sat dismally around 50 per cent. A presidential candidate could romp into the White House with the support of a touch more than a quarter of eligible voters.
In 1996, Bill Clinton was re-elected with less than 50 per cent of eligible voters casting a ballot. Four years later, George W Bush won the election by a handful of votes in Florida as determined by the Supreme Court of the US, while only 50.3 per cent of eligible voters voted across the country.
Voters turned out for the show
In this election at least 66 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot and when it is all done and dusted that figure will be closer to 70 per cent. If pre-poll voting regulations forced by the Covid pandemic remain in place, voter turnout, which has been one of the lowest in the western world, may well continue to break records in future elections.
There have been almost 160 million votes cast according to the Electoral Project. Not all counts are official. In some states counting is continuing. Currently, Joe Biden has 79 million votes, Trump 73 million.
The Governor of Utah, Republican Gary Herbert tweeted yesterday there was a 90 per cent voter turnout in the state. I’m not quite sure what calculations he was using, possibly registered voters, but with voter-eligible population as the denominator, Utah’s turnout was 69.2 per cent.
By the same method Minnesota had the highest turnout, nudging 80 per cent with Maine, Colorado, Washington and Oregon following close behind. All deep blue states. Colorado was a swing state in 2016 but it isn’t anymore. Two swing states this time around, Wisconsin and New Hampshire, recorded voter turnout in the mid-70s.
Other crucial swing states — Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan all had voter turnouts in the low 70 percentile. Georgia reported a 68 per cent voter turnout, Arizona and Nevada 65.
Some of the southern states recorded the lowest voter turnouts but comparatively the turnouts were still high. Tennessee recorded a 59.7 per cent turnout. While the state allowed absentee and mail-in voting it applied restrictions on all pre-poll voting which, in the case of illness required the voter to provide a doctor’s certificate. But in the blue state of Hawaii, not as desperately affected by Covid and with an automatic mail-out of ballots, only 57.5 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots.
But seven in ten voting nationally in a system where voting is optional is cause for congratulations rather than the dismal and entirely unsupported view that the US is on the verge of a domestic conflagration. In Australia where voting is compulsory, 91.9 per cent of voters voted in the 2019 election. The results in the US across many states are not that far from that figure, all with voters casting a ballot voluntarily.
We might look back at the 2020 Presidential election as a one off or it might be the start of a new age where more and more people engage in the democratic process. No doubt there is more electoral fury, dodgy quibbling, more theatre to come. But the bleak view of a US that has lost its faith in its democratic institutions cannot be sustained.
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