Election will have lingering effects

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/11/2020 (1411 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After several agonizing days of waiting for late vote-count totals, the most consequential U.S. election in a lifetime seems finally to have produced a result.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s apparent victory, however, is not the only outcome that matters. U.S. Election Night 2020 also revealed five salient political truths that will overshadow the final vote tally.

First, the polling industry faces a profound crisis. Donald Trump shocked the world in 2016 by defeating Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, despite having been left for dead by pollsters and their media partners. Days before that election, numerous polls gave Clinton a greater than 90 per cent chance of victory.

Likewise in 2020, the vast majority of pre-election polls held steady for months, consistently forecasting if not a landslide for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, then at least a fairly certain win. The morning of election day, Biden was seen as leading in national polls and all six swing states, provoking an unnerving sense of déjà vu on the political left.

Those instincts were correct. There were four years of assurances by firms and pundits that this time was different, yet the same result: the public blindsided by the polling industry’s inability to predict voter intentions.

Second, the election further underlines how the electoral college system does not produce representative democracy. In 2016, Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million but still lost the election. Now, in 2020, despite Joe Biden shattering Barack Obama’s record popular-vote total from 2008, the election outcome was still a contest.

Meanwhile, Trump’s re-election strategy the whole time has been pinned on the spirited turnout of a feverishly devoted base that comprises no more than one-third of American voters. This lack of proportional representation is a glaring flaw in the U.S. electoral system — it actively fuels social polarization by incentivizing candidates to heavily prioritize and cater to voters in certain strategic locations, often in direct contrast to popular opinion. This scenario should sound familiar to Canadians, given our similarly flawed first-past-the-post system.

Third, in defiance of our data-driven era, increasingly complex personal histories and socioeconomic circumstances mean you can’t lump voters into boxes, presuming how they will vote simply based off an identity checklist. Retail politics — that is, candidates and party volunteers canvassing districts to meet and engage with potential voters — still matters.

This was proven by Trump’s outsized showing in Florida’s populous Miami-Dade County. A Republican strategist gloated to NBC that the Trump campaign had been proactively connecting with local Cuban-American and growing Venezuelan-American communities for years, driving home the message that the Democrats represent the type of nightmare socialist regime these voters had fled from.

The Trump team’s ability to motivate them, despite widespread belief that immigrants would never cast their votes for such an outwardly racist and xenophobic president, was the catalyst for Trump winning one of the election’s most coveted states.

Fourth, if Joe Biden is indeed sworn in as president, his agenda is likely to be thwarted by the combination of Republicans retaining control of the Senate and eating into the Democrats’ majority in the House of Representatives. This will derail the most progressive parts of Biden’s campaign platform, such as his US$2-trillion climate plan, proposed expansion of Obamacare and raising taxes on the rich.

A Biden win may provide anxious observers the chance to exhale, knowing that Trump is no longer at the helm, but it is not sufficient to guarantee large-scale progress on its own.

Finally, Trump’s post-truth stamp on American politics is guaranteed to live on, as encapsulated by the election to Congress of two outright promoters of QAnon conspiracy theories.

The QAnon community, which was labelled a domestic terror threat by the FBI in 2019, has grown to over four million believers across 15 democratic nations, including Canada. QAnons view Trump as their lodestar in a pitched battle with an evil deep-state cabal running child sex trafficking rings that harvest the blood of children for grotesque rituals.

A Trump loss may serve to validate these baseless beliefs and inflame the feelings of QAnon supporters that they are indeed being persecuted, and thereby convince more of them to organize runs for public office. The New York Times reported in July that more than a dozen QAnon supporters are already running in elections at the state and local levels.

So while the long days of waiting may have finally produced a definitive result, the real story of U.S. Election Night 2020 is how it reinforced the uncertainty surrounding America’s fractious future, and the challenges facing what is still the world’s most powerful and influential nation.

Kyle Hiebert is a research analyst and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.