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November 4, 2020 - 10:41am
Once again Donald Trump has defied expectations. In proving the pollsters and pundits spectacularly wrong, he’d be a position to present a narrow advantage in the Electoral College not as a win, but as a famous victory. In fact, with the results still far from in, that’s what he’s already doing.
But if he is re-elected, his mandate is likely to be even weaker than in 2016. Let’s not forget that Hillary Clinton got almost three million more votes than he did. This time round Joe Biden’s margin could be much bigger (though we’re a long way from the final tallies). What would be really awkward is if Biden gets more than 50% of popular vote and still doesn’t become President. Remember, Clinton only got 48% — somewhat blunting the sense of injustice.
Obviously, it’s not the popular vote that decides who gets the White House; but if Trump’s majority in the Electoral College is only obtained after legal battles in multiple states then that would further add to the bitterness of his re-election.
That said, a Biden victory would be a pretty weak one too. The Senate is likely to remain in Republican hands, which would mean he wouldn’t be able to do much about the 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court. Furthermore, at the age of 78 he’d be the ultimate lame duck President. His only hope of achieving meaningful change would be to govern from the centre and reach across the aisle — but would Kamala Harris, eyeing up the 2024 Democratic nomination, allow that? And would the Republicans be in any mood? With Trumpist diehards whipping up resentment amid claims of a stolen election, the chances are slim.
Just as well the next administration doesn’t have anything big on it plate — like overcoming a deadly pandemic or reviving a devastated economy.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeBiden a lame duck? He’s a dead parrot. He confused his grand-daughter with his dead son and is nothing but a senile puppet. His strings are in the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous leftists. All those squawking snobs out there who baulked at Trump despite everything – the riots, the chauvinist hatred stoked by supporters of “BLM”, the collapse of honest debate and free thought – will have their snobbery rammed down their throats if the Democrats manage to win. Worse, because this is America, the rest of us will suffer mightily too.
Biden will be removed with weeks to be replaced by Kamala. Things will then get back to ‘normal’. That means a new war or two, selling out the country to China, and open borders.
Quite so – not to mention the further entrenchment of an arrow slit Overton Window on the far left and the effective criminalisation of Conservatism.
“Obama Normal”, yes, Slightly better than the Neocon-Normal of the GW Bush years.
I don’t like either of those choices. That’s why I’m rooting for Trump this time around.
Nobody looks likely to win. A marginal win by either side leaves 50pc of the population deeply unhappy at the result. Given the usual inchoate rage on the Right and the prevalence of guns in their hands, street violence doesn’t seem a improbable scenario. At least, with a Biden win the country will have a centrist president and there’s a chance of since middle ground being reached. Another 4 years of Trump will likely stoke up the far-right nationalists not just in the US but around the world. The frenzies of bigotry and racism we’ve seen so far could descend into something much worse. Germany in the 1930s might have felt something like this.
Your TDS is showing, dear
You need to stop watching CNN.
So, all that looting, rioting and “mostly peaceful” arson that’s been going on for the last six months, was that the left or was that the right?
You speak of the “usual inchoate rage of the right” with all the usual inchoate rage of the left – which these days extends to sacking heretics, burning cities, defunding the police and asking unarmed British officers “not to shoot”. Such rational tranquillity!
absolute drivel
We keep hearing about the “popular vote”, as though that mattered. It doesn’t, and for a good reason. The Democrats have been shifting more and more power to the centre for decades trying end-run around the Constitution. Things like health care and education are supposed to be states’ responsibilities, but when you’re engaged in bribing the electorate with their own money under the cover of a supposed “great republic”, who cares about states’ rights? This is where they’ve finally hit the buffers. There’s only so much sharp practice that people are going to put with.
When you have a country so badly educated that it can’t tell a phony TV celebrity from a successful businessman, and citizens literally dying because they can’t afford drugs freely available on EU health services, it would seem time for the government to step in. Which yes, means using people’s taxes to pay for those things.
Uhu. The people are too stupid to know what’s good for them. They need people like you to tell them. It all makes sense now.
As Biden ascends into his flawed Presidency (most likely by the end of the week), the gloating of some will be countered by an angry roar. We will be lucky to have a divided government and the investigations will enable the press to leap into battle mode. Interesting times, full of great turmoil. The next election in 2022 may prove to be a great reactionary story.
Not “reactionary”; don’t use the Marx-based language of the left; say “Restorationist”. Two of the greatest dates in history are 1660 and 1815, when the Stuarts and the Bourbons were restored to the thrones of Britain and France. The next great restoration was 1979, when Thatcher the Great began to rebuild liberty; and the best of all was 1989, when the reds were dragged kicking and screaming from their watch-towers and listening posts and torture chambers and exposed for who and what they really are: thugs, criminals and crazies. This stolen election will be a step too far and crimes on this scale cannot be hidden for long – no, though all the bullies and lickspittles and timeservers in the world unite to cover them up.
You’re missing the point. Biden and Harris don’t want a mandate for change. They just want the money.
you are half-right,
biden – as we see from his family and the lies the leftist media in the
US deliberately covered up, has been after the money,
harris, though, who performed so poorly in the democrat primaries that she wasn’t her own party’s leading choice, is a front for the far-leftists behind her, she is more the ideologue wanting to “change” for all the worst reasons,
I saw her during the judiciary hearings of Justice Barrettt, she was dreadful, obnoxious, trying to advocate a “case” that the Justice hadn’t even heard,
that was not the intent of the hearings – which basically are a good idea, let the public see the candidate – but have become so distorted politically, and this time was the worst so far,
three women mostly, Ms’s Harris, Feinstein, and Hironto, trying to destroy an outstanding woman poential Supreme Court Justice on purely political grounds,
that polarization bodes ill for the US, and has been slmost entirely stirred up by the far left.
I don’t see Harris as ‘far left’. Harris has no convictions. She is an empty vessel into which are poured whatever views are to her advantage. In the recent election campaign that meant emphasising her race and gender. Back in 2019 she was clearly the DNC’s favoured candidate. She had to withdraw before the first primary, however, because members saw her as a corporate shill. Expect more of the same: governing in the interests of corporates and electioneering as if she came from the hood. She has Obama as a role model and her eyes are already on the Harris Foundation which she will establish after leaving the White House.
If Biden fails to survive until January then USA will have it’s first female president.