It is the nightmare scenario everyone dreaded: no clear result has emerged from the US presidential election, and Donald Trump has threatened to see everyone in court.
Barristers, instead of polling booths. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work. But, of course, we’ve been here before.
And if you were one of the millions of Democrats in America who wanted at all costs to avoid this very situation, you’d have every reason to feel furious.
Not with Trump. He’s playing to win, which is about the most predictable thing about him. Shame that the Democrats didn’t do the same. No guts, no glory. They went with a lame candidate, who in the final days barely campaigned.
Maybe they — like most of the media, especially here in Australia — thought it was a done deal. But the polls were wrong … again!
Why anyone was taking them seriously is anyone’s guess.
We surely know from last time that Trump supporters are suspicious of the mainstream media.
They are therefore suspicious of pollsters, who work for the mainstream media.
They don’t think it’s any of your business who they’re voting for; they are very shy about revealing their hands. But still, how does somebody like Nate Silver, from FiveThirtyEight, leave the house of a morning?
He was badly wrong in 2016, giving Hillary Clinton a 72 per cent chance of victory.
He was badly wrong again on election day, giving Joe Biden all kinds of states he didn’t win. The New York Times in 2016 gave Hillary Clinton an 85 per cent chance of victory. The polls at one point had Trump’s hopes of holding Florida at less than 10 per cent. He claimed it half an hour later.
The polls said he’d lose Ohio. He won it. The polls said he’d lose Iowa. He won it.
The Times also ran a piece during the campaign seriously suggesting that Texas might turn blue. And it might roll over in its own grave. It’s Texas. It was always in Trump’s column.
But never mind all that, because truly we are where we did not want to be, staring down the barrel of yet another ugly court battle. How can that be? Why didn’t Biden win it in a canter?
Well, there is a truly daft idea out there that, like a cockroach, just won’t die, and it goes something like this: the economy won’t matter so much this time, because of x, y or z. The economy always matters more than anything.
Voters are not going to vote against their own prosperity.
When Gallup polled US voters in October on the most critical question — are you better off than you were four years ago? — overwhelmingly, they said yes.
Yes, even with COVID-19 factored in, they said yes.
Trump was ahead of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan on this question, and they all got second terms.
There just aren’t enough ways to say this: the No 1 issue for the bulk of US voters — and Australian voters — is always the economy. But not only the economy. Politics is passion, as much as it is power.
Trump’s base is hugely passionate, and when he called on them to turn up for him this week, they did. It is still possible that a winner will emerge, before any court action gets under way.
We need that to happen.
This election has been described as one “for the soul of America”. Well, the soul of America is democracy.
And in a democracy, elections are not decided by barristers. They are decided by Americans, in the polling booths.
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