Greg Sheridan
US election: Pitchforks in hand, Donald Trump’s Deplorables dig deep for man with a mission
The Deplorables brought their pitchforks and did it again. They have brought Donald Trump to the brink of what would be the most astonishing and revolutionary victory in modern presidential politics.
Trump fought furiously all the way to the campaign’s end and his energy has translated into millions of unexpected votes.
The election is too tight to call finally. In the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump was leading at time of writing, but the votes still to count will be disproportionately postal votes that will favour Joe Biden.
Arizona seems to be the one state that definitely flipped. Trump won it in 2016 and has almost certainly lost it this time, although the Trump campaign still claims it’s too close to call.
But this is an astounding reversal of what every poll forecast.
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Trump held Florida and Texas and North Carolina and, Arizona apart, all the other states the pollsters said he could lose.
The alleged wave of revulsion Americans felt at Trump just wasn’t there. It existed in the fever of self-reinforcing liberal media comment, not in reality.
Even the national polls were disastrously wrong. Trump is closer to Biden on the popular vote than he was to Clinton four years ago, a little over 1 per cent behind.
All the national polls said he would lose the popular vote by at least 7 per cent. This is a disastrous failure by the polls.
The campaign had three clear turning points.
One was when Trump caught COVID-19. For all that he was condemned for his extravagant words and appearances without a mask, the COVID experience established him as a fighter and focused the whole nation back on Trump.
The second was when Trump got Biden in the last presidential debate to say that he was planning to “transition out of oil”. Look at that vote in Pennsylvania. The more radical the Democrat policy is, the less the public likes it.
It was Trump’s mission to make the voters dislike the Democrats’ policies even more than they disliked Trump’s personality.
And the third turning point was Biden’s bizarre decision to virtually stop campaigning two weeks out from the election. The Biden team thought it was so far ahead that only a big gaffe from their man could change the direction of the election.
But elections teach us over and over again. You can’t take voters for granted.
Biden wanted Trump to be the centre of attention. Guess what, so did Trump.
It also seems that the Democrats did not gain control of the Senate. This is critical, whichever candidate wins the presidency.
Republicans, and Trump supporters more generally, should still be cautious.
Trump can certainly still lose this election. There are in total some millions of votes still to be counted. Postal votes in particular have skewed heavily for Biden simply because Trump urged his supporters not to vote by post.
It is difficult to imagine that any legal challenge Trump could mount would result in large numbers of postal votes not being counted, although all courts are inherently unpredictable.
So the result is still genuinely unknown.
The Republicans probably holding the Senate is even more important if Biden wins the presidency. If Republicans control the Senate there is no possibility of a Biden administration packing the Supreme Court by expanding its membership beyond the nine that has been its size for 150 years.
It also means Biden cannot effectively stack the Senate by transforming Washington DC and Puerto Rico into states, which could be expected to permanently return Democrat senators.
Biden was sensible enough in his election-night statement to claim likely victory, to say that he was confident he would win.
While ever a leader is in a contest with any chance of winning they need to project confidence to their followers.
Trump’s concerns about potential voter fraud in counting postal votes are wildly exaggerated but not wholly baseless.
Several of the Democratic Party’s own primaries were an absolute shambles with the wrong candidate declared winner in at least one case.
With millions of ballots posted out to voters’ last registered addresses the potential for irregularities is serious. Big-city political machines are particularly adept at “discovering” ballots previously unheard of. There is a serious history of this in the US.
Historians believe that in 1960 Democrat machine politicians stole Illinois, which John F. Kennedy won by 8000 votes, from Richard Nixon, although Kennedy would have won the election even without Illinois.
On any measure Trump wildly outperformed expectations. The result is a shocking repudiation of the American liberal establishment. Is there the slightest chance this establishment might admit it got something wrong?
The Republicans seem to have gained seats in the House of Representatives.
Almost the entirety of the mainstream media loathed and demonised Trump. But the people took no notice. The election shows that the US remains intensely and almost evenly divided.
Whichever side ultimately loses, it will believe it was robbed, and so many activists on both sides truly hate the other side.
The election may be over, but the conflict goes on and on.
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