Who will win the US Elections?

 

For the past weeks, I have been watching, listening to, and reading material from election "experts" and pollsters, as well as partisans from both sides, and the only clear message is that no one is confident that they know who will win the 2020 US Presidential elections.

Here is a great example. For years, Texas has been considered a reliably Republican state. Texas also has the second most Electoral College votes in the nation. You will recall that the US President is not elected on the basis of the gross, popular vote; but on the states each candidate wins. Whether candidates win a state by one vote or ten million votes, they take all of its of electoral college votes, with the exception of Nebraska and Maine, which allow candidates to split the total. For the past several election cycles, Democrats have been predicting that will change based on demographic changes they believe are in their favor. If Democrats carry Texas, there is essentially no way that a Republican can take the White House. Period!

With the COVID pandemic still raging more Americans are voting remotely this year, casting their ballots early by mail. As of today-the day before Election Day-more Texans have voted by mail than the total number of Texans who voted in 2016. Yet, when pressed about the nature of that large mail-in vote (mail-in votes are usually thought to favor Democrats), analysts are all over the place and loathe to nail down what it means. And that's pretty much the state of things here in 2020.

Election polls have had decreasing accuracy for some time, given change in technology and in how specific demographic groups vote. The 2016 election was an almost fatal blow to their credibility as almost all of them were predicting an easy victory for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. It exposed outdated sampling methods and, for many, a level of inaccuracy that reflected "a liberal bias." This year, much of the media has been undisguised in a common desire to get Donald Trump out of office. Before the COVID pandemic, however, the US economy was so strong that their desire seemed like a forlorn hope with little chance of coming to pass. Then it seemed to many that Americans were rejecting President Trump based on how he handled the pandemic and on the fact that we no longer had a booming economy.

But things changed again, and with Election Day in the United State tomorrow, it remains difficult to make accurate predictions about who will be the next US President: President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden. As we get closer to the actual vote, races in those states that will determine the outcomes (see my September 17 article) are tightening. This generally happens in US elections unless we are looking at a landslide for one or another candidate. That does not appear to be happening. If I have to predict a winner, I'm predicting a Biden victory and am doing so on the basis of two 2020 dynamics.

President Trump won in 2016 in part because undecided voters broke heavily in his favor in the final stages of the campaign. And I believe that is happening in 2020 as well. The fact that so many people voted already-at a time before we started seeing the same Trump surge that led him to victory in 2016-means that it is likely a great many cast their votes before that phenomenon occurred.

Trump's 2016 victory occurred because he carried every traditionally Republican state, as well as every swing state (that is, that could go either way), with the exception of Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia. That gave him 306 electoral votes, 36 more than he needed. In 2020, those states as well as seven that he won in 2016 are considered friendly to Joe Biden or toss-ups. And those states have a total of 84 electoral votes, or 48 more than Biden needs to win. Moreover, even that scenario has Trump holding key states like Ohio and Florida (another 47 electoral votes). This means that-if the polls are accurate, which is not a sure thing-there are a lot of states that have to go to President Trump for him to win, and Joe Biden can lost a lot of them and still win the election.

Complicated? No doubt, and I'm predicting a Biden victory based on the lack of clarity in the race even at this late stage. I could be wrong and would not rule out a Trump victory. If you want signs, however, here are some:

* If Trump carries North Carolina, which reports its totals earlier than many others because it's on the east coast, he will be in better shape to win as totals come in from the rest of the country. If Biden takes that state, Trump could be in trouble.

* If Georgia (also an east coast state) is not as close as Democrats have been predicting, again, expect a strong night for Trump. If Democrats carry Georgia, I believe the election will be over except for the final count and Joe Biden will be the next President.

* Pennsylvania was an early key pick up in Trump's 2016 victory, but as someone born in Pennsylvania and serving as Senator from adjacent Delaware, Biden always has had strong support there. He should win Pennsylvania, but if Trump carries the Keystone State, he is likely to win.

If the polls were out of sync with current technologies before COVID-19, they are even more so now. There are only two things about which I am certain in this election. One is that barring a landslide for either candidate, we will not know the winner by Tuesday night because of the time consuming task of manually counting such a large number of mail-in votes. And, the second is that, make no mistake about it, this election is about Donald Trump and the strong passions most people have about him. For many voters, it almost did not matter who the Democratic challenger was, and the Democrats nominated someone who most believed would be an acceptable alternative to President Trump. More radical candidates, such as Senator Bernie Sanders, were thought too far on the left and that they would alienate potential voters.

Were they correct, or were they simply in love with their own propaganda about the President? Eventually, we will learn if their strategy accurately gauged the sentiments of most Americans or if they were as out of touch as they were in 2016.


The writer is an American intellectual and a geopolitical analyst.