What the US election taught me about America

The US Election turned into a marathon with Joe Biden finally declared the winner five days after the polls closed, with around 68% to 72% of voters turning out to vote. I felt early on Tuesday and into Wednesday this was going to take time given the huge turnout and postal ballots.

Watching the results map on Wednesday there were no surprises in the states Trump and Biden won, but we were watching the swing states whereas of Saturday morning Biden gained two toss-up states with six to declare. We are also waiting for Senate results which are tied on forty-eight each and in the House, the democrats are short by six.  

The argument framed by Trump has been discredited by many fact-checking organisations, the facts are that rate of voting fraud overall in the US is less than 0.0009%, according to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice.

The Federal Election Commission head Ellen Weintraub has said: “There’s simply no basis for the conspiracy theory that voting by mail causes fraud.” I think that the postal voters were higher yes which has lead to delays in counting and projections, but its more likely that these will favour the Democrats as they urged there voters to vote either through early voting or postal, while Republicans told their voters not to trust postal voting.

The American system is not a first-past-the post but an electoral college, this means you win the state and its electoral college votes which are determined by the size of their population. As predicted the preliminary figures on voter turn out shows 66.5% of voters turned out at this election, with a five per cent rise on 2016.

The biggest thing I think we can draw from this election which has been an ongoing theme of the past five years in America but around the world is the big divide between the right-wing ‘republicans / conservative’ party’s and the left-wing ‘democratic / Labour’ party’s.

Watching the last year, you had the feeling that Trump wouldn’t go without a fight, he is only protesting the results in places like Pennsylvania where he had an early lead in the in-day voting and then lost thanks to postal voting.

His campaign will spin that as Rudi Giuliani told NBC “You don’t lose leads like that without corruption.”

Trump also tried to cast doubt on the Pennsylvania results Saturday, writing in his statement that “legal observers were not permitted meaningful access to watch the counting process” and adding that “legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.”

I think that will be the theme for the lame-duck period, between now and January. It came as no surprise that as we continue to count and wait that Trump would claim victory and use Twitter to criticise the slow process. You need to wonder how much of Trump’s reaction, was for his supporters and the TV.

The questions facing the Republicans do they shift towards more away from the right towards the centre, and away from the Trump style of populism. The immediate challenge facing the country is, of course, the Coronavirus, Biden made his first priority of his transition team to build a task force on tackling the pandemic.

This was written before the events of Wednesday, but thinking about the rioting and storming of The Capitol I think it again highlights how divided America is. Trump needs to take responsibility for dividing America and building this narrative of a rigged and fraudulent election. We need to understand how this shapes America going forwards.

Trump is still going to be a powerful force, but his behaviour during the first weeks of this year I think proved that he still pulls his supporters in and they still believe in messages like “drain the swamp.”

I think the Biden presidency will be calm, we have to go back to traditional politics, I think compared to the last four years have been headline-grabbing for sometimes for there extortionary nature. Biden will make headlines, but for undoing a lot of the policies by Trump.

It was Trump, who said, “you can’t be a president when much of what he’s done we’ve undone.”

I think the danger is getting into a pattern whenever we have a change of party in The White House, they reset back to the time their party last held the presidency. I wonder if we get two terms with Biden-Harris, what Trump’s legacy?

I think we don’t know; in my view, he has weakened America on the global stage. We know American’s don’t tend to hear much foreign news, turning mainly to the BBC, like the UK the public they have become warry of foreign conflicts following the Bush/Blair wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Cameron-Clegg/Obama intervention in Lybia.

Looking at the exit poll data, more people shifted toward the democrats in non-college-educated area’s Biden flipped three key states and gained Georgia and Arizona from Trump. After a few hours of sleep, my first conclusion was this “Its tighter than I expected,” though I didn’t think this would drag on until Saturday.

Trump’s reaction while I think it was unsurprising, it is degrading to the office of president, but it was a message he had to put out to his supporters. There are still this group of supporters who we described in several pieces as ‘the forgotten,’ the coronavirus meant the message Trump was not able to campaign on the scale he would have of liked to.

Since 2015 watching America it has become a divided country, inti pro-Trump and ant-Trump. We mustn’t forget the route cause of the Trumpism, that is the people who don’t subscribe to the traditional form of politics, and hearing voices in America it’s even more divided.

The biggest challenge for the Biden-Harris administration is to reunite America, rebuild its place in the world while trying to answer how you keep these right-wing supporters of Trump from not feeling alienated. Alienation of certain groups has been the hallmark of Trump politics.

Trump isn’t going away, I think will be different from the retired or former politicians, normally they in my view take a low profile and only speak when they feel it’s important. That gives them gravitas, but I don’t think that Trump will follow the ‘retired statemen’ model.

We can’t expect Trump to be the statesman, he never was, many former presidents tend to take up a dignified role speaking and about his time as president. I expect him to still to be vocal on Twitter, but what role does President Trump take up next?

With rumours of potential lawsuits ahead, don’t expect him to drift off and write his presidential memoirs… what happens next is anyone’s guess, but ‘The Trump Show’ isn’t over…