US election 2020: Trump deserves to lose … but not to the incompetent Biden

Donald Trump does not deserve a second term but American voters face a wretched choice.

‘He’s not going to die wondering’: Donald Trump at a rally in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania. Picture: AFP

Can Donald Trump possibly win from here? Can the reality-TV impresario, showman par excellence, bend reality itself to his will? If he does, it will be the most extraordinary victory in presidential history, more astonishing than his astonishing victory in 2016, more embarrassing for pundits and pollsters than Harry Truman’s shock win over Thomas Dewey in 1948, when the Chicago Tribune front page embarrassingly blared, “Dewey Defeats Truman”.

Trump is coming home full of energy and fight. He’s not going to die wondering. But COVID-19 may have defeated him. He started a long way behind.

Normally a candidate’s energy counts, especially at the end. But some 85 million Americans have already voted. In Texas, as many people have already voted as the entire total in 2016.

Final turnout could be very big. Trump’s base is fiercely loyal but has never been more than about 40 or 45 per cent. A big turnout is probably bad for him. Joe Biden has barely campaigned in the last fortnight, rising to a tepid effort in the last few days. That suggests his people think he’s way ahead.

Like a South African rugby team 15 points up with 10 minutes to go, he wants the ball out of play while the clock ticks down.

But Trump still can win. Nate Silver’s 538 website thinks Trump has a slightly worse than one-in-six chance. That’s a small chance, but it’s not negligible. The Economist election calculator gives Trump a 5 per cent chance, which is a long way from Nate Silver. Even 5 per cent is not nothing. Betting markets are a good bit closer, but don’t mean much in politics. The RealClearPolitics average of polls puts Biden just over 7 per cent ahead nationally, substantially better than Hillary Clinton at this time in 2016, and just over 3.2 per cent ahead in the battleground states, which is also a bit better than Clinton four years ago.

But the polling company that predicted the battleground states right last time, Trafalgar, has Trump winning. The mainstream polling companies have worked hard to improve their sampling and analysis since 2016, especially in battleground states, but Trafalgar thinks their methodology is still inadequate.

With increased, often savage, polarisation today, conservatives may be even more loath than four years ago to participate in polls or tell pollsters they support Trump.

Nonetheless, for Trump to win, there must again be consistent polling errors. Here are three states to watch on election day. Trump needs 270 Electoral College votes. He is even or just behind, having been briefly just ahead, in Florida. He more or less must win Florida and its 29 college votes. He is behind in Pennsylvania, which has 20 college votes, but behind by a smaller margin than the polling error last time. And he’s behind but close in Arizona. If polls are consistently understating Trump, he could win all three. If he does, he will go close to winning the presidency again, but he would still probably need one more state where he’s now polling way behind.

Nonetheless, it’s possible Trump could lose the popular vote by 5 per cent — reflecting huge votes against him in California, New York and Illinois — and still squeak home through a narrow majority in the Electoral College won by narrow majorities in key states.

That would produce a scream of outrage from Democrats and the activist left. But it would be a democratic result. The US presidential system is not a pure popular vote. It is a popular vote mediated through a federal structure. In parliamentary democracies it is not uncommon for a party to win a majority of seats with a minority of votes. Commentator Gerard Henderson points out that there have been five federal elections in Australia in which the party winning the majority of the two-party-preferred vote has not won the election.

So the odds strongly favour Biden, but Trump has a chance.

It Trump loses it is entirely due to COVID-19 and the very poor response he made to it. It is true that managing the virus is chiefly the responsibility of state governments. It’s also true the US performance in COVID deaths is broadly comparable to big European nations. But Trump’s rhetoric and leadership on the virus have been so confused, self-contradictory and at times dishonest that he deserves much of the criticism he gets. Sometimes Trump is his own worst enemy. Some of the things he says are ludicrous. Thus, rather than admit he underestimated the virus early on, he told Bob Woodward in a recorded interview for the book, Rage, that he knew all along how serious it was but didn’t want to alarm Americans so played down the risk.

That is a bizarre statement. That Trump spent so long giving tape recorded interviews to Woodward more than anything shows an astonishing lack of political judgment. But also, at the time Trump is talking about to Woodward, the overwhelming need was to project calm reassurance and get Americans to follow social distancing advice. No president could do that by saying the whole thing is a phony story.

More recently, Trump has been saying America is “turning the corner” and putting the virus behind it. His campaign spokespeople say the administration has solved the virus crisis. Yet 230,000 Americans have died from COVID and this week the US was recording nearly 85,000 new infections a day — a record.

Trump has some big achievements to his name — tax cuts and deregulation, which led to a booming US economy and record low unemployment, especially for minorities, before the virus; deregulation and a pro-business administration; calling out China truthfully on trade and other issues; significant prison reform to get nonviolent offenders, especially minorities, out of jail; effective control of US borders and seriously reduced illegal immigration; hundreds of judges appointed including three Supreme Court justices of the highest quality who are originalists and textualists, meaning they interpret written constitution and laws rather than inventing new social rules by creative interpretation of texts; a staggering three Arab-Israeli peace treaties; the military defeat of ISIS; containment of Iran; increased defence budget; and being the first president since Jimmy Carter not to engage in a regime change military offensive against another nation.

These are substantial achievements. Even The Economist magazine, routinely almost apoplectic in its contempt for Trump, acknowledges most of these achievements. But at the same time, Trump has grievous deficits. He lies frequently and easily. He speaks in a way that is intolerable for anybody in national leadership. He is foully abusive of political enemies and in the past especially of women. In the past he characterised some minorities — especially Mexicans and Muslims — in especially offensive ways.

Even his economic achievements have their downside. At no point has Trump made the slightest effort to address, much less reduce, much less eliminate as he promised, the yawning federal budget deficit. Official US debt will soon go beyond 100 per cent of US GDP. Crazy ideas like Modern Monetary Theory are getting purchase in these deranged times, which is just another excuse for thinking there is a magic money tree that can solve all problems forever. His fiscal recklessness represents a characteristic weakness of contemporary populism.

And in foreign policy he expresses a frankly disgusting admiration for the world’s worst dictators and he frequently trash-talks US alliances. He has erected trade barriers against not only China but many US allies and trading partners that do not break international trade rules. His language, even regarding nuclear weapons, is frequently dangerous and his foreign policy is erratic and unpredictable, as outlined in excruciating detail in the book, The Room Where It Happened, by his former national security adviser, John Bolton.

He also unforgivably scrambles his business interests with the business of the US government, and unethically scrambles his political interests with US diplomacy.

On balance, I think Trump deserves to be thrown out.

However, equally, Joe Biden does not remotely deserve to be elected. It’s a wretched choice.

Acknowledging that Trump has achievements, and Biden weaknesses, means the highly emotional Trump-is-the-devil brigade will label you an apologist for Trumpism and probably declare you a racist and white supremacist as well. Pointing out Trump’s grave failings earns you the opposite criticism from Trump loyalists that you are an apologist for globalism, probably an agent of UN world government and perhaps a lizard illuminati.

Biden’s cognitive decline is obvious in unscripted encounters. Just Google his excruciating, terrible moments of calling Trump George, presumably getting him confused with George W. Bush. This is merely the latest in dozens or hundreds of cases where Biden, who if he wins will be older in his first day in the presidency than Ronald Reagan was on his last day in office, demonstrates manifest mental incompetence.

Biden, like his vice-presidential running mate, Kamala Harris, appears to have no fixed political principles. He was once a centrist but drifts wherever the zeitgeist takes him. Once a friend of segregationists and opponent of school busing, he is now a right-on, woke, Black Lives Matter, identity politics aficionado.

Once the champion of the working-class unionised work force, he now wants to abolish the oil industry, abolish fossil fuels, which means abolishing the gas industry, which surely means ending US energy independence and destroying US manufacturing as energy prices inevitably soar. He plans eye-watering trillions and trillions of dollars of new taxes.

And he has embraced, though obviously without conviction, enthusiasm or perhaps even altogether comprehension, every jot and tittle of identity politics and critical race theory, the most destructive ideological forces at work in America today.

Paradoxically, it would be best for Biden if Democrats fall just short of capturing the Senate. They need a net gain of three senators to get to 50-50, an effective majority if Biden wins the White House, as the vice-president has a Senate casting vote in the event of a tied vote. If the Democrats fall just short in the Senate, Biden will have a surely welcome excuse not to implement radical policies, which would probably produce a savage backlash at the first mid-term elections, similar to those suffered by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at their first mid-terms.

Most of the US media has performed appallingly in this election. It is a dark victory of Trump’s that he has convinced his opponents to behave as badly as he does. During the last few weeks a trove of emails has emerged that seemingly implicates Biden in schemes by his son, Hunter Biden, to sell access to the then vice-president in exchange for lucrative business deals in China and Ukraine. It is reasonable to be sceptical of these emails but their authenticity has been attested to by numerous people who appear on the mail chains and neither Biden has claimed the emails themselves are fake. Any decent media would investigate them vigorously. But most US media is so committed to defeating Trump they refused to examine the emails or the issues they raised at all, and abused anyone who did so.

In the single most sinister turn of the campaign, Twitter and Facebook became political censors by blocking any mention of the emails, except to denounce them. Similarly Twitter blocked US Customs and Border Commissioner Mark Morgan, who praised the border wall for keeping out violent criminals from Latin America. It did this on the grounds that such tweets constituted “hateful conduct”.

The tweet may be unpleasant. But this grossly arrogant assumption of the power to impose political censorship by Big Tech-owned social media companies is the worst and most undemocratic development of this election cycle.

If this election is close, there will be all kinds of legal challenges. It’s been a wild ride. It ain’t over yet.