Today, the Democratic Party seems more united, still glowing in the aftermath of the defeat of Trump. But that is just an illusion: Joe Biden’s first hundred days in office are almost up — and the internal conflicts of his party are bound to surface soon.

These divisions are not petty, or merely personal, but based on demands from a number of incompatible constituencies and ideologies. Take the Democrats’s newest supporters: America’s tech oligarchs, Wall Street financiers and urban real estate speculators. They may act “woke” on issues surrounding gender, race and the environment. But such “virtue signalling” is no substitute for the drastic policies pushed by the party’s Left: the confiscation of vast wealth, the break-up of monopolies and the introduction of ever-higher taxes. Big business, after all, is the clear winner in the status quo that the Left, with good reason, despises.

But the impending Democratic civil war is more than, as some conservatives see it, a two-dimensional conflict between “the establishment and the radicals”. Largely ignored in this narrative is the most unappreciated, least articulate yet arguably the largest Democrat-voting bloc: middle and working-class moderates who make up roughly 50% of the party. These voters may often favour populist economics, but remain threatened by the cultural, economic and environmental policies pushed by the other two factions.

All of which leaves Biden in an unenviable position: if he seeks to placate both the corporate woke and the activist Left, the Democrats could sever their last connections with the vast majority of the country, and allow the GOP, even in the wake of the Trump disaster, to recover political momentum.

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California is collapsing

By Joel Kotkin

For what it’s worth, Biden has often been associated with this largely neglected group of what might be called FDR Democrats. His reputation as a moderate “reasonable guy” helped secure the votes of older Democrats, Independents and African-Americans in the recent election. In the primaries, it gave him an edge over both the radical Sanders, whose program frightened many older voters, and the candidates of the corporate elite, notably the well-financed former Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. These voters may be fading in the numbers, but still constitute up to 44% of the total electorate, easily the largest identifiable class constituency.

Certainly, parts of Biden’s program — expanding health coverage as well as investments in basic infrastructure and manufacturing — could appeal to these voters, who are now generally supportive of an activist government. But Biden has also backed measures on cultural and environmental issues that are unlikely to win over the traditional working and middle classes. For example, fracking bans, already endorsed by Vice President Harris, could, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, cost 14 million jobs, far more than the eight million lost in the Great Recession.

Belying his regular guy image, Biden has also expressed support for programmes that would force suburban areas to densify. It is likely few suburbanites, the majority of all Americans, would welcome federal overseers deciding how their communities should be changed. Meanwhile, attempts to force residents out of their cars and into transit, something they were abandoning well before Covid, seems quixotic as well as politically stupid. The President’s Transportation Secretary has even suggested a tax on “vehicle miles” travelled, a measure almost calculated to alienate middle and working-class families outside a few dense urban cores.

And then there’s the Biden cultural agenda, built largely around critical race theory. It would, in effect, force the majority of Americans, particularly Asians, to accept permanent race discrimination in terms of access to jobs, college educations and entrance to competitive high schools. Moreover, its timing could hardly be worse: it galls many to see, amid a pandemic and deep recession, a sudden huge surge of refugees at the border. Even Hispanics in some border states, whose politics tend align with grassroots working-class interests, see this new wave of immigration as a direct threat to their constituents’s  personal and economic safety.

How did their interests fall so out of favour? Well, their waning influence is principally the result of a merging of wealth and corporate power in Democrat politics that has been building for at least fifteen years, blossoming richly under President Obama. Both Biden’s primary campaign last year and his election victory were financed largely by big Wall Street firms, tech oligarchies, the mainstream media and other wealthy elites. Vice President Harris, in particular, is close to America’s new oligarchy, notably Facebook, while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has close ties to Microsoft.

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What haunts Hunter Biden?

By Tanya Gold

Biden has already delivered on one of tech’s biggest concerns: the restoration of HIB tech workers — essentially, relatively cheap short-time servants from Asia. The Bay Area economy, for example, depends on for as much as 40% of its workforce from non-citizens. It’s no surprise that the travel ban and Trump’s often crude policies on immigration helped transform Silicon Valley  into a virtually one-party state .

But this corporate Leftism extends well beyond Silicon Valley. Where the Democrats once ruled mining and manufacturing towns; today they represent 41 of the 50 wealthiest Congressional districts. Wall Street and the tech oligarchy can afford not to see Biden’s “green agenda” as raising living costs or threatening jobs. Instead, Valley oligarchs and Wall Street financiers salivate over the potential killing to be made from subsidies for their renewable fuels investments and electric car schemes, as the radical filmmaker Michael Moore, among others, has documented. The green economy has already spawned its first mega-billionaire, Elon Musk, whose core businesses feed largely on regulatory and tax policies that favour his products.

All of which grates somewhat with the third Democrat faction: the illiberal neo-socialist Left. People like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez rail against the extreme inequality associated with Silicon Valley and Wall Street. AOC has even suggested a country that “allows billionaires to exist” is immoral.

But while this inevitable conflict is yet to achieve centre-stage in Washington, it is surely only a matter of time before it erupts. Already in Seattle, local progressives have been feuding with Amazon, the city’s mega-employer whose founder, Jeff Bezos, is a Democratic ideological enforcer (through control of the Washington Post and the book industry) and donor to Biden. Meanwhile, San Francisco has also passed legislation to confiscate some of the wealth of its huge tech elite.

Ultimately, it won’t be easy for Democrats to accommodate both the world’s most avaricious capitalists and grassroots radicals. These agenda-setting Leftists are openly hostile to free enterprise system. Indeed, the recent bitter fight in Nevada, where insurgent socialists won all five party leadership positions in the local party, will likely be replicated around the country.

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The death of American dignity

By Justin Webb

In contrast, the GOP, once the country-club party, does not ignore the sentiments of the unwashed —  white working class voters, small business owners and, to a surprising degree, minorities such as Latinos, whose economic interests, aspirations and social views are often at odds with the Democrat’s new “progressive” agenda. Today, you often hear more interesting social democratic ideas about boosting the middle class and curbing the oligarchy  from the conservative intelligentsia and GOP Senators like Florida’s Marco Rubio.

Yes, these proposals are often detested by libertarians and the last vestiges of traditional corporate conservatism, but there’s not much clamour in the electorate for a return for the Bushes or Mitt Romney. The populist wing of the Right has identified patriotism, homeownership, small business and upward mobility at its core — ideas which are largely ignored or even demonised by the Democrats’ dominant factions.

As their traditional constituency shifts, Democrats will struggle to maintain their odd coupling of the woke and the ultra-rich. They could try to square the circle by devising a more regulated economy that would curb competition — always manna for the monopolists — while dishing out more welfare and subsidies to allay the potentially disruptive masses.

But this trick, particularly as the bond markets and foreign investors begin to recoil from massive deficits, may ignite a battle over raising taxes, which would force the party to go after the tech monopolies, who historically pay little. It could also force them to increase levies on its cadre of educated upper-class adherents.

In the meantime, however, the contradictions between socialism and even woke capitalism may prove too massive to reconcile. It seems certain that far-Left candidates will continue to challenge and replace old FDR-style Democrats, particularly in big cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis and Seattle.

Growing pressure from the Left, and also from the financial markets, could undermine Biden’s brief kumbaya moment, forcing him to choose between the interests of his elite and grassroots supporters. A Democratic Civil War seems inevitable — and in such a scenario, the winner will only be the Republicans.

Many were shocked to hear him speak in such terms. But in Africa, this sort of language is commonplace, and disputed elections are routine. I remember one presidential ballot in Togo, during which the incumbent stopped the count and declared himself the winner. I quipped that his was “le vote d’or”, and an African friend just reminded me of this, seeing sharp parallels with Trump’s behaviour.

As a society polarises, so questions of legitimacy surround elections. In the past few months alone there have been allegations of voting irregularities, fraud and cheating in Cote d’Ivoire, Tanzania and Guinea — the losers crying foul, and calling for civil disobedience, supporters being beaten to death. This isn’t just a question of bad losers; this is about the destruction of democracy. Indeed, in many places in Africa, such as Tanzania, it seems close to death.

Many Americans, not least Trump himself, will doubtless find this comparison demeaning. The myth of American exceptionalism will die hard. But what the nation is facing fits a generic pattern: America would be wise to learn from Africa, before the damage is such that it cannot be repaired.

Once a society is split by polarised identities, each seeing the opposing group as an existential threat, any losing candidate benefits from claiming that the winner cheated. It seeds a narrative that in the eyes of supporters — such as the 70 million Americans who voted for the Trump — undermines the legitimacy of the winner. And the consequences can be devastating.

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Why we should be more like Denmark

By Paul Collier

The business of a democratic government is to achieve the collective purposes for which it was elected. This depends upon many people accepting that they should comply with actions necessary for achieving those purposes, even though they would prefer not to do so. Conversely, they accept that they should refrain from other actions that would frustrate those purposes. This acceptance is the practical meaning of legitimacy.

In America, even more than in Africa, once opponents are able to tell themselves that they are under no such obligation, they will stop at nothing to frustrate a presidential agenda. America has so many potential checks and balances that if abused, like filibusters, specious court cases, and misleadingly phrased plebiscites, government can grind to a halt. The slide towards opposition without bounds does, as we are seeing now, seem well under way — and the Democrats have inadvertently helped it along. First with Bush, and then with Trump, they questioned the validity of the electoral process. And when it becomes a salient bipartisan political activity to challenge the prevailing rules and procedures of the electoral process, democracy will start to unravel.

What, then, can be done to halt and reverse the damage

The courts can’t help. In fact, they’ll probably make things worse. Trump has already threatened to try it. While Biden will, of course, win, in the eyes of many Trump supporters this will not restore legitimacy. Lawyers for each side will put forward rival narratives, and polarised supporters will accept their own side’s version. The judges, however, are no longer seen as above politics: they are widely seen as having been appointed for their political allegiance. This is especially so among Trump’s supporters, who perceive lawyers and the judiciary as being predominantly Democrat. So, Biden’s success in the courts will merely accentuate, in the eyes of Trump’s people, the intransigent self-righteousness of Democrat activists, which is already part of the problem.

In my experience, there is only one way of resolving these sorts of differences — and it doesn’t involve the courts. The first mover has to be the winner: think Nelson Mandela, and Yitzhak Rabin. Instead of victor’s justice, there has to be a “dialogue” established on the electoral process which establishes a “common core” of agreement. A “dialogue” is not a shouting match: it is a non-abusive conversation between equals, in which each party accepts that the purpose is to find some mutual understanding on the basis of which something can be agreed. It is how American politics used to be conducted.

A “core” is a concept in game theory: the deals that neither side would walk away from, back into the status quo of limited legitimacy, rather than accept. That will require mutual agonising. I fear, though, that the “common core” is going to be quite limited. I will suggest two propositions that might make it into that zone of agreement, one on the Electoral College, the other on vote eligibility. Given the temperature of current hostilities, both would doubtless provoke outrage — from both sides.

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Would you take a coronavirus risk?

By Tom Chivers

Repeatedly in American elections, disputes have centred on a tiny number of votes in a few large states. This arises because of the practice, followed in most but not all states, that all of the state’s votes in the Electoral College should be awarded to the winner. The motivation for this practice is that it inflates the political importance of the state at the expense of those that divide their College votes in proportion to the vote of their citizens. This is a zero-sum game which skews government attention and finance between states for no good reason.

In the process, it results in a common loss to all: ambiguous results and the consequent loss of legitimacy. It would, therefore, be better for all if the practice already followed in two states – Nebraska and Maine, one Republican the other Democrat — became mandatory. They both divide their delegates according to the vote of their citizens. On reflection, it is extraordinary that on such an important matter there has been no nationally-agreed rule. Perhaps it is a legacy of “state’s rights”. An agreed rule would be like mutual disarmament. It could prevent another presidential election being determined by a few hanging chads.

The second proposition concerns postal voting, which, perhaps because of the pandemic has suddenly become far more common, and which Trump is most exercised about. When postal votes were negligible, there was no cause to be concerned about them. They are, though, inherently less satisfactory than in-person votes. Most obviously, there is no means of guaranteeing the fundamental principle that the casting of a vote by an individual is secret to that individual. More subtly, it systematically lowers the cost of voting to people like myself: well-educated and familiar with planning ahead, who take it in our stride to write to request a form, fill it in, and send it off well ahead of time. Not everybody is like that: they face the higher costs of voting in person.

There is a reasonable argument for ensuring that the voting behaviour induced by Covid does not become part of the “new normal”. Not only should every citizen have the right to vote, but we should also all face the same cost of doing so — in person on the same day — unless there are clear and agreed grounds for a postal vote, a medical-certificate, say. In retrospect, it was perhaps a mistake of the Democrats to direct the passion of their supporters into postal votes. I doubt that it was necessary in order to get the Democrat vote out; hatred of Trump is at least as widespread as support for him. While fully justified when linked to the pandemic – and matched by the socially distanced Democrat rallies — inadvertently it opened a line of attack which Trump supporters will embrace.

These lines of attack — not only from the Right; the Left got busy after the last election — are now creating dangerous fissures in American democracy. The trouble with democratic societies is that those insiders who run them can become dangerously complacent, as if there were some magic gold dust making their societies existentially immune from problems common elsewhere. This is why Americans won’t care to be compared with Africa. But the US urgently needs to wake up: the longer polarisation is allowed to take hold and fester, the more difficult it will be to reverse.

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America's divisions will only get worse

By Douglas Murray

The lesson from Africa is that in the long run there are no real winners from polarisation. Society is left struggling to function with an ineffective state and the consequences play out in both social and economic distress. We can see America already going down this path. Both its health care and its education system have become staggeringly expensive at the top, and embarrassingly inadequate for everyone else. Its tax system has become a bad joke, even among the billionaires; and its once-lauded product markets are no longer as competitive as those in Europe. Given the potential from the technical progress in which America still excels to improve all American lives, outcomes such as these are manifest symptoms of severe public policy failure. And that, in turn, is ultimately attributable to dysfunction in democracy. If the sacrifices needed to avoid it aren’t made, then everyone, not just Trump, is a loser.

The pollsters, after three or four days of intense anxiety and abuse, are basking in this last-minute reprieve. If, as is now likely, Biden ends up with 306 Electoral College votes to Donald Trump’s 232, that looks a lot like the comfortable win they predicted — and the final 4-5% popular vote advantage will be only a few points off. OK, they got Florida wrong, but basically the polls were right, right?

Of all people, I should be pushing this latest version of events. I predicted on election day that even if the polls were as wrong as they were in 2016, Biden would still win comfortably. So am I now vindicated too?

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In polls we trust

By Freddie Sayers

Sadly not. The word ‘comfortably’ is not just a detail, it’s the whole story. And there has been nothing comfortable about the past week.

The overall story that the polls told was that this election was not even going to be close — as YouGov’s Doug Rivers put it with admirable candour in our pre-election interview, “either we’re badly off or this is not going to be close.” Trump obviously didn’t win, so the praise being heaped on Robert Cahaly, the pollster who forecast a Trump victory, is equally misplaced — but the President came a lot closer than he was supposed to, and that’s important.

One of the many facts Democrats have deployed for years when discussing the shock 2016 result is that as few as 70,000 voters across crucial swing states handed Donald Trump his victory. Poll watcher Nate Silver’s explanation for why he gave a Trump victory such a low probability at the time is that it was a genuine “low probability event” — a number of states that were incredibly close just all happened to flip into Trump’s column. It was kind of a fluke, in other words.

But contrary to the forecasts, we’ve just been through another nail-biter. As results stand, if just 25,000 voters across Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia had chosen Trump instead, Biden could never have reached the magic 270 electoral college votes. Commentators were right to observe that 2016 was weirdly close, but then so was 2020.

In 2012, the last “normal” presidential election, only 4 out of 50 states were even close, with final victory margins of under 5%; in 2016 that number more than doubled to 10, and in 2020 it was still 8. In 2012, there was only one state that had a final margin of under 1% (FL), but there were 4 such states in both 2016 (MI-NH-PA-WI) and 2020 (AZ-GA-PA-WI). If these four states had edged in the other direction, in both elections the other candidate would have won. No polling company can realistically measure a state-wide difference that small — in both elections those four states could easily have gone either way.

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Is Donald Trump toast?

By Freddie Sayers

Once again, the polls systematically underestimated the Trump vote across the country: states such as Ohio, Iowa and Texas were widely predicted to be close when they weren’t, and Wisconsin was predicted to be in the bag for Biden when it should have been too close to call. Looking only at states where 100% of the votes have been counted, the YouGov 50-state model has an average of over 5 points margin error in the Democratic direction, and in deep Red states such as Arkansas and Mississippi the error increases to over 8 points.

The reason this matters is not to give pollsters another shellacking — they have been doing their best to get it right — but to reckon with the profoundly important fact that, once again, there was a slice of the electorate that simply wasn’t showing up in the official measures. It is analogous to the wider political situation: just as these voters aren’t properly represented in opinion polls, they still aren’t well understood in the mainstream conversation. The fact that the 2020 result will probably end up with an identical Electoral College margin to the 2016 result, with just a few states flipped narrowly the other way, is a sign of how little we have moved on in the past four years in terms of understanding this hidden part of the population.

The New York Times’ graphics showing whether each county moved more Republican (red) or Democrat (blue) shows near-stasis this year compared to the strong red shift in 2016.

Pollsters will soon start coming out with technical postmortems which, while no doubt useful, must not be allowed to confuse the bigger picture. Sure, the demographics were different this time — this time it wasn’t poor white men that they miscounted so much as certain sections of the Latino and Black populations, alongside the college-educated and suburban white women.

But the fact that their blind spot has shifted does not make it less concerning. The two most common explanations — “shy Trump” voters not admitting the truth to pollsters (or perhaps even themselves), and the (in my view more salient) fact that less engaged members of each of these demographic groups are less likely to end up taking a survey in the first place — both point to the same bigger problem. There is a section of the population that is almost invisible to the mainstream and incomprehensible to polite society. They are as “unheard” as ever, and it must be our mission to understand them better.

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Who are the real Shy Trumpers?

By Eric Kaufmann

The opposite instinct, dangerously tempting for some American liberals, is to sit in moral condemnation of the over 70m of their compatriots who voted for Donald Trump. This attitude requires us to believe that 70% of the citizens of Wyoming, and 40% of the population of New York, are bad people — the idea is itself morally repugnant and will only lead to future electoral failure.

A more useful objective for Democrats would now be to focus, in a way they failed to do in the past four years, on what about Trump’s offer made it so attractive to so many good people, despite his glaringly obvious personality flaws. This is their best bet to taking their party out of margin-of-error territory next time round. Happily, in his remarks so far, Joe Biden has emphasised the need for healing and speaking for all Americans, but there will be many in his administration who take a sharper view and it will be a daily struggle to resist them.

I concluded my pre-election piece by saying that, if Trump ended up surprising everyone and actually winning re-election, “it would mean we have to rethink the basic epistemic foundations of our public conversation”. We didn’t reach that rather hyperbolic-sounding moment, but those foundations took another knock last week. The close result means that Donald Trump and his millions of supporters were not entirely wrong, even though they weren’t right either, to dismiss the opinion polls as part of a wider mainstream stitch-up; it means that his low approval ratings, endlessly referred to throughout his presidency, were probably also off by a similar margin, and that the whole framing of the race was misconceived.

It is a powerful reminder that we should be careful before writing off those who reject the establishment way of thinking alongside the sophisticated tools used to reinforce that reality. It also serves as a warning to the many wielders-of-charts to be more humble in their presentation of them (note to Nate Silver: “Fuck You, we did a good job” is not quite the right tone).

At points during results night, I had the eerily familiar feeling that Trump had gone and done it again. At those times it almost felt uncanny, as if he had been able to reach otherwise hidden voters using intuitions that the pollsters and pundits simply didn’t possess. In the cool light of day, with Biden’s electoral college victory now clear, that sensation is receding with all the speed of a bad dream. A few more months and perhaps the whole Trump era will start to feel the same way. But we mustn’t let it — the issues and people he spoke to remain all too real, and must now be taken seriously, not forgotten.

I was particularly inspired by a recent post on the subject from Robert Wiblin of the effective altruism charity 80,000 Hours, who helped me understand a few things.

First, it’s unlikely that your vote will be the one that, on its own, changes the course of an election. It will probably not turn a win into a tie or a tie into a win. That’s because millions of votes are cast. 

If there were only 10 people voting as well as you, then there would be 1,024 possible different ways the 10 of them could vote, of which about 250 would be a 5-5 tie that you could break. So – assuming all the other voters were equally likely to vote A or B – there would be about a 25% chance that your vote would make the critical difference. If you go up to 100 other voters, it becomes about an 8% chance.

Of course, you can’t be the actual tiebreaking vote in the US election, because it’s not decided on the popular vote. But you could break the tie in a single state which then goes on to break the tie in the electoral college.

But how likely is that? On the face of it, not very. Even the smallest US state, Wyoming, has over 200,000 registered voters; most have millions. The odds of breaking the tie in one state is small: even in Wyoming (and even assuming other voters were equally likely to vote for either party, which they are definitely not; it is one of the safest Republican states, voting 67% Trump in 2016), then it would be less than one in 500. 

And even if you are the one who breaks the tie in that state, that state then has to be the one to break a tie in the electoral college for your vote to affect the overall outcome, and since there are 50 states and the smaller ones have less influence, the odds of your Wyoming vote being the tiebreaker are commensurately tinier.

So that might sound like your vote is essentially meaningless. But it’s a bit more complicated than that, for two reasons. One, not all states are equally likely to be tied, or to be tiebreakers; and two, the value of a vote is determined not just by how likely it is to have an effect, but by how big that effect will be.

The statistician Andrew Gelman’s model suggests that there is about a one in 7.7 million chance that a voter in Pennsylvania could swing the election, because it is a reasonably big state that is likely to be close. A voter in Wisconsin has about the same chance; a voter in Nevada, about one in 12 million. Meanwhile, very safe states – such as the aforementioned Wyoming, or California – are very unlikely: one chance in many billions. So if you live in a swing state, your chances of deciding the election are thousands of times higher than in safe ones. 

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How hysterical punditry failed America

By Michael Tracey

Wiblin raises an interesting aside, by the way. You might be thinking “Hang on, there’s no way that a state is really decided by a single vote. If it’s that close, there’ll be court battles about recounts and so on.” And that’s true.

If vote-counting were absolutely perfect, and we knew down to the exact one how many had voted A or B, then candidate A would have 0% chance of winning if they had one vote less than their opponent, and a 100% chance of winning if they had one vote more. But given that counting isn’t perfect, then it’s not quite as clear as that.

If the count finds that one candidate in a swing state has won by a single vote, it’s almost certainly going to be challenged in the courts, and that challenge might be successful. If that candidate is found to have won by 100 votes, the challenge is that much less likely to work. If it’s 1,000 votes, it’ll be less likely still. If it’s 10,000, there might not be a challenge at all. A vote for a candidate in that situation doesn’t instantly tip a result from win to loss, but it might make some small difference to the chance that the result will be challenged and overturned in the courts.

So instead of having a one in 7.7 million chance of being the tipping vote, a Pennsylvania voter might have a somewhat larger chance of helping to avoid a recount or to make their side more likely to win that recount, which then translates into the same one in 7.7 million chance of affecting the election overall.

Still, though, one in 7.7 million doesn’t sound very much. But that’s where we have to introduce our second point, how much the outcome matters. What matters is not just the likelihood, but the likelihood times the outcome. Here, I need to bring in the idea of expected value. 

Expected value is a concept from probability theory. Imagine we were playing a game of dice. We roll a die: on a score of one to five, you give me a pound; on a score of six, I give you £10. Should you take that bet? You’re probably going to lose, after all. But if we played six times, on average, you would lose £5 and win £10, for a total gain of £5. My expected value for each roll, therefore, is £5 divided by six, or 83p. I can’t actually win 83p on any single roll, but if I did it a million times, that’s what I’d expect on average. So the bet is a good one.

Let’s say, then, you’re in Pennsylvania, and you’ve got your one in 7.7 million chance of being the magic vote. How can we work out the expected value of your vote?

The obvious thing to look at would be the overall spend of the United States government. In the 2019 financial year, the US government spent $4.45 trillion. Over four years, that’s nearly $18 trillion, or about $130,000 for each American who voted in 2016. If it was as simple as “If the candidate you want gets in, he will spend that $18 trillion on good things; if the other one does, he will spend it on bad things,” then the expected value of a one in 7.7 million chance of directing $18 trillion is pretty huge. It would be the equivalent of being in charge of a nearly $2,400,000 budget. Even if you lived in California and had only a one in 9.4 billion chance of being the deciding vote, that is an expected value of nearly $2,000.

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Of course Trump can win

By Matthew Goodwin

Of course, that’s not what actually happens. The bulk of the spending is already locked in, on social security, Medicare and Medicaid, road maintenance, interest on the public debt, things like that. 

And under the US system, presidents have surprisingly little power. Wiblin points out that last year, in the UK, the hung parliament meant that Theresa May’s government struggled to pass its agenda, and that this was really weird and unusual and the situation was rectified with an election. But in the US, it’s often true that the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency are split between parties, they stymie each other, and nothing very much gets done.

Still, the Trump administration, although in general (as I understand it) a legislative and policy failure, did manage to get a tax cut passed in 2017 which the Congressional Budget Office estimates lowered federal revenues by about $300 billion in 2018. That’s about 8% of the total revenue that year. More generally, presidents have huge power over foreign policy – they can decide whether to go to war, for a start, and the war in Iraq cost trillions of dollars. I think it’s pretty reasonable to think that a choice of president could affect a single-digits percentage of total US government spending. If we say 5%, and that you’re a Pennsylvania voter, then your vote probably has an expected value of about $120,000. (If you’re a California voter, on the other hand, it’s probably only about $100.)

There are harder-to-quantify non-budgetary values as well, of course. Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, says a lot of untrue things. If you think that his constant lies and misinformation are corrosive to public debate, you might feel that has some value that is difficult to assess in dollar terms. Similarly, he is a destabilising influence on the world order, threatening to remove the USA from international bodies like the WHO and Nato and undermining international cooperation; whether you think that’s a good or a bad thing depends on how you value the world order, but either way, again, it’s a difficult thing to price. 

Also, while – I’m surprised to learn – fewer immigrants have been deported per year under his presidency than under Obama’s, the administration has upped the rhetoric on immigration, and introduced a blanket policy of the separation of migrant children from their parents (separation did happen under Obama/Biden, but in rare cases, not as a general policy). Whether you approve or disapprove – the latter seems bafflingly cruel to me – you’ll want to assign some value to voting for it.

It’s not that you can’t put a dollar value on these things – you absolutely can, just as people can put a value on a year of human life (between $50,000 and $150,000 in the US, apparently). But it’s much harder, and would involve a much longer piece than this. I’d be happy saying they add significantly to the value of a vote; whatever value you give them, the same calculations about the likelihood of that vote having an impact apply.

But these hard-to-quantify values bring us to the third point: how confident are you – or should you be – in your decision? For instance, I would have probably bet that there were more deportations under the Trump administration than under the Obama one, but (as I have just illustrated) I would have been wrong. If I were a single-issue voter who cared solely about the number of deportations, I would have voted exactly the wrong way, if I assumed that a Biden administration would be more like Obama’s than Trump’s. If you are completely uninformed about some policy or other, then your voting will be no more likely than chance to improve the situation.

In general, whichever way you vote, about half of the population will vote the other way. In most situations, if you believe something and half of the world believes the exact opposite, that’s a good reason to pause and wonder how confident you should be in your belief.

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Is QAnon on the brink of power in America?

By Travis View

That said, as Wiblin points out, there are reasons to assume – given that you are reading this – that you are better informed than the median US voter. He quotes Ilya Somin’s 2013 book Democracy and Political Ignorance as saying that less than 40% of US voters knew who controlled the Senate or the House ahead of the 2014 elections, or that the government spends more on social security than on foreign aid. (Which it does, by about 20 times.) Keeping informed about politics is time-consuming and difficult and most people don’t enjoy it. So if you are doing some relatively basic things, like reading about the US election, and know basic things like who your congressional representative is, you are probably better informed than most. Still – if you are, say, 75% confident that you know the best way to vote on some issue, then you should downgrade the value of your vote by 25%.

(I will note that I don’t trust people who claim to be 100% confident in anything.)

There are also ways of improving your confidence that your vote will do what you want it to do. Wiblin points out a very simple one – find a clever friend whose judgment you trust and whose political opinions you largely agree with, and ask them who they would vote for. You can also look up surveys of expert opinion on various matters, such as Chicago Booth’s US Economic Experts Panel.

So: is voting worth it? First – of course, there are other reasons to vote than for cold-eyed estimates of your impact on spending. It communicates your preferences; some people see it as a civic duty; some people just enjoy it. And there are other things to vote for than simply the president: votes for local congressional races, or even votes for local district attorneys or dog-catchers or whatever, have much smaller electorates and so it is more likely that your vote will be the deciding one (although on the flip side, the impact of those outcomes will be smaller).

There are a couple of other considerations, as well. Wiblin points out politicians can ignore demographics that don’t usually vote – young people, for instance. If you are in such a demographic, then simply by raising the percentage of that group which voted, then you will make a small contribution to forcing politicians to pay attention to what that group wants. Something similar applies if your voting in a safe state makes it less safe.

Another, more complex, point is that other people think like you, and your behaviour affects other people’s behaviour. So there’s effectively game of the prisoner’s dilemma going on. If there are five of us voting, and I know that two people will vote A, and I want to vote B, then I won’t bother if I know that the other two are going to stay home. But if they know I’m going to stay home, they won’t bother either. By reliably voting, you make it more valuable for other people to vote. 

But to come back to our original question, if you are thinking in pure numbers terms, then, in short, whether voting is worth it depends on where you live. If you live in Pennsylvania, then your vote probably has about a one in 7.7 million chance of affecting perhaps 5% of US government spending over four years – so it has an expected value of about $120,000. Depending on how confident you are in your ability to pick the right candidate, then your vote could be worth as much as that. Even if it takes, say, two hours to vote (which is apparently a thing), then you are doing $60,000’s worth of good per hour. 

Of course, if you have to spend many hours researching your vote beforehand, that reduces the value accordingly, but unless you value your time extraordinarily highly, then it is probably a good use of your time per hour.

From the same author

The nerd's guide to football

By Tom Chivers

If you live in Kentucky or Wyoming or Oklahoma, though, where the odds of your vote being decisive is more like one in 50 billion, then the calculations are very different. Your vote is probably worth something in the region of $20. I could entirely understand not wanting to spend two hours in the rain, or many hours looking up the impacts of different policy measures, for that. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it if you see it as a civic duty, but I don’t think you could be reasonably judged for deciding it is not worth your time.

If you’re in one of the in-between states – Colorado, or Alaska, or Ohio, places in the one-in-150-million-ish zone – then you have to decide. The sum I’ve been using is $18 trillion (the total US government budget over four years), multiplied by 0.05 (the percentage I estimate that would be affected by a change in president), divided by the chance that you will cast the deciding vote, as given in Gelman’s model here. The expected value of your vote in those in-between states ends up in the mid-four-figures, usually. Then you need to work out how many hours it will take you to do the research if you need to, and to vote. And if you’re not confident that your vote will help – if you think you’ll just be adding noise to the already noisy system – then you may well decide it’s not worth it. 

If, though, like me, you live in north London, haven’t been to the USA for years, and are in no way a US citizen, then you can’t vote at all. Your opinion, as opposed to your ballot, is worthless and you are paying too much attention to the Americans again. But since you will have elections of your own in your own backwoods country, you might dust this piece off in four year’s time.

In a follow-up piece, And Then the Breitbart Lynch Mob Came for Me, Brooks detailed the torrent of abuse that came her way after the piece was published. The alt-right had responded to her suggestions with howls of indignation, culminating in a death threat: ‘I AM GOING TO CUT YOUR HEAD OFF … BITCH!’

Four years later, and President Trump is refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, is referring to mail-in ballots as a “big scam”, and declaring he wasn’t sure that the election could be “honest”. Shortly after his release from the Walter Reed Medical Center, Trump shows no signs of softening. He reiterated his contempt for the American electoral system in a frenzied tweet-storm:

Ari, THE MEDIA IS CORRUPT, JUST LIKE OUR DEMOCRAT RUN BALLOT SYSTEM IS CORRUPT! Look at what’s happening with Fake, Missing and Fraudulent Ballots all over the Country??? VOTE https://t.co/PaFBuskB19

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020

Along with his recently expressed desire to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send troops onto American streets during the protests which followed the killing of George Floyd, the President has spurred speculation that he might seek to use the US military to prolong his time in office. New York Times Columnist, Thomas Friedman, described Trump’s statements as “a six-alarm fire”, saying “I think it’s DEFCON 5;” and Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, warned that Trump, protected from ongoing criminal investigations only so long as he is in power, is unashamedly putting the nation on notice that he is planning a coup d’état.

Leading Republicans have promised an “orderly transition” which has reportedly been insufficient to relieve deep anxieties shared by senior military and Defense Department officials that they may be given unlawful orders if deployed during protests after the vote. In public, officials have insisted that the US military will not play a role settling election disputes — but debate is said to be intensifying in private about its role should there be civil unrest.

And now, a group of lawyers is officially offering advice to worried military and National Guard members. In the US, the law requires service members not to obey “flagrantly unlawful” orders but those who refuse to obey orders take considerable risks as, under military law, disobeying an order is itself a criminal offence. The Orders Project, founded in response to the militarised use of force against protestors this summer, has compiled a legal sourcebook for military personnel as a guide to what a soldier’s legal position might be in situations where loyalties conflict.

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What if Trump loses the election?

By Justin webb

So, it turns out that Brooks anticipating that the military might refuse “to obey certain orders” wasn’t such an incendiary fantasy after all.

In fact, exactly this scenario — in which a president’s closest aides and military chiefs deliberately ignore or subvert orders from their Commander in Chief — has already played out in American history, under Richard Nixon. Such were his aggressive and impulsive outbursts that military and defence officials feared he might upset the fragile geopolitical order of the late 1960s/early 1970s. “If the President had his way,” Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, quipped on several occasions, “there would be a nuclear war each week.”

According to several members of Nixon’s inner circle, many of whom I met during the making of the documentary, The Secret World of Richard Nixon, there were a number of episodes in which the President’s staff thought it better to ignore his orders or to come up with explanations of why they couldn’t be carried out.

On 29 August 1969, for instance, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked a US passenger plane en route from Rome to Tel Aviv and forced it to land at Damascus International Airport. Nixon spent that evening with his friend Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo, a Florida businessman who also served as his personal financial adviser. At 3am, according to Leonard Garment, Nixon’s Special Assistant from 1969 to 1973, the President called Kissinger, and said: “Henry, I want you to set in motion plans for the bombing of Damascus. This is an order. This is not something for discussion.”

Kissinger told the President that he would do as he asked, but in fact did nothing. Syria, then as now, was a Russian ally, and such a move would have been highly confrontational, potentially sparking a larger conflict between the superpowers. Kissinger interpreted Nixon’s order as, in his words, “posturing for the people he was with that evening” and decided to take the matter into his own hands. No bombs were dropped on Damascus.

A year later, in the middle of September 1970, terrorists from the same organisation hijacked several aeroplanes and forced them to land in the Jordanian desert. Nixon again responded by ordering bombing raids on PFLP positions in Jordan, which this time would have provoked both Syria and Iraq, the PFLP’s Russian-backed sponsors, and complicated Jordan’s position as a US ally.

After consultation with Kissinger, Nixon’s then Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, told the President that cloud cover made such a raid impossible. ‘Conveniently,’ Laird said later, ‘there was bad weather.’ (Jordan’s deserts in summer aren’t known for their heavy rainfall.) ‘I’ve always tried to carry out the orders of the Commander in Chief’ said Laird, ‘but on some occasions it was better to protect him.’

Towards the end of Nixon’s presidency, as Watergate took its toll on his mental equilibrium, some of his staff went further.

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The Republican Party's descent into darkness

By Ian birrell

In the spring of 1974, Joseph Laitin, a public affairs officer at the Bureau of the Budget, was walking up a stairway in the West Wing of the White House when someone ran down the other way, bowled into him, and took off with a number of other men in pursuit. ‘My God,’ Laitin thought. ‘That was the President of the United States running away from six Secret Service agents.’ The look in Nixon’s eye, he said later, ‘was one of desperation. And that bothered me.’

James Schlesinger, then Secretary of Defense, felt similarly. He was concerned about Nixon’s access to the nuclear codes. At a meeting of the Joint Chiefs attended by Laitin, the chairman General George S. Brown the told the gathered company that Defense Secretary Schlesinger ‘wanted an agreement from the Joint Chiefs that nobody would take any action, or execute orders on the use of nuclear weapons, without all of them agreeing to it.’ According to Laitin, ‘they were shocked, but they all agreed.’

Schlesinger was also concerned about the possibility of the President trying to sidestep impeachment by surrounding the White House with troops loyal to the presidency – in the same way that Pentagon officials are now worried about Trump potentially refusing to leave the White House and ordering troops onto the streets to quell any civil unrest should he contest the election result.

Fearing the ‘bloody mess’ that might ensue if two sets of US troops found themselves facing each other outside the White House, Schlesinger issued another unorthodox order. “I told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he disclosed in an interview 26 years after the event, “that every order that would come from the White House had to come to me, directly, immediately upon receipt. There were not to be any extraordinary military measures that would be taken at anyone’s behest.”

A former head of the CIA, Schlesinger was not a liberal by any definition. Reportedly, his first words on taking office there were: “I’m here to make sure you don’t screw Richard Nixon.” By the spring of 1974, however, he believed that the President was no longer capable of controlling his emotions. Some – such as Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald Ziegler – maintained that it was inappropriate for Schlesinger to issue such orders. But Schlesinger, who died in 2014, remained adamant that he had done the right thing. “The President was the duly elected man in office,” he explained, “and it is not the responsibility of his cabinet officers to question whether or not he is balanced – save when there is clear evidence that he is no longer capable of the job.”

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How Trump could refuse to go

By Daniel Baer

Interviewing members of the Nixon Administration about this period, a picture emerged of individuals constantly improvising in the untidy grey area of conflicting loyalties to the Constitution and Commander-in-Chief. Their responses altered from day to day with Nixon’s changing mental condition as well as rapidly evolving political events.

In the end, facing the near-certainty of impeachment, Nixon resigned peacefully on the 8^th of August 1974. No ‘extraordinary military measures’ were taken. Ultimately politics and personality decided the day. Evidence of Nixon’s complicity in the cover up surrounding the Watergate burglary had eroded his remaining political support and, in the face of overwhelming opposition, his rage and paranoia gave way to defeat. These factors and the presence of certain key individuals around him ensured that the system was respected.

Of course Trump is not Nixon. And, although Trump’s political support may wane should he lose the election, his grandiose narcissism may elicit a different response, as might the guidance of those around him. In an interview last month, former political consultant to the Trump campaign and convicted felon, Roger Stone, told InfoWars’s Alex Jones that Trump should impose ‘martial law’ in the event of ‘election fraud’. And in June, when Trump decided to put on a show of strength and give a speech outside a church that had been damaged during protests close to the White House in D.C.’s Lafayette Square, the military provided assistance – armed members of the National Guard were present while military helicopters circled above. And, as he walked across the square, the president was flanked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, wearing military fatigues, and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper.

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Trump's biblical power play

By giles fraser

Both Milley and Esper faced a barrage of criticism for taking part in the event. Milley publicly apologised. “I should not have been there,” he said in a video address soon afterwards. Esper also broke with the president, saying that active duty troops should not be sent to control protests. “I don’t support invoking the Insurrection Act” he told reporters gathered at the Pentagon.

If Trump fails to agree to a peaceful transfer or questions the election result, it will be another ‘stress-test’ for a political system, which has already been pushed to new extremes under this presidency. For now, at least, the military has made its position clear, stating that it will play no role in the transition of power after the election. In his closing remarks during a virtual town hall at the end of September, General Milley encouraged US troops to remain neutral: “Stay apolitical,” he said “and keep the Constitution close to your heart.”

Milley’s words contained an echo of President Gerald Ford’s speech given at his swearing-in ceremony after Nixon’s resignation. “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” said Ford. “Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”

Let’s hope that, whatever the result, the same is true after November.

Addressing a vaccine-sceptic fellow Republican, Governor Scott said, “We’re in the middle of a pandemic. One of the front-runners on the Democratic side has questioned the science of vaccines. Do you accept, like I do, that vaccines are essential to public health and getting us out of this economic crisis that we’re in?”

Governor Scott is on the side of vaccines. His claim was that Lt Governor David Zuckerman, a pony-tail wearing Democrat who is now the challenger for the Governor’s job in the November election, is an anti-vax candidate.

Now, Vermont politics is rather incestuous and sometimes downright weird. One of the questions asked of the Governor by a fellow candidate during the debate was: “How do you justify not speaking up against the Department of Corrections forcing people to masturbate and measure their penis size or having undocumented strip searches called the naked monkey dance?” But putting that eccentricity to one side, there can be no doubt that David Zuckerman, a Democrat who may well become the Governor of the state of Vermont, or in the future a replacement in the Senate for its most famous political son, Bernie Sanders, has sided with people who do not approve of vaccines.

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When will the Covid-19 vaccine arrive?

By Saloni Dattani

During a debate in the Vermont Senate in 2015, about efforts to force more parents to vaccinate their children, Mr Zuckerman said the pharmaceutical companies were in it for the money, rather than the health benefits. He maintained this gave parents the right to keep their children un-vaccinated:

“For me, as long as there’s the extreme financial conflicts of interest out there that are driving much of this debate and discussion, I have to maintain the individual right for someone to do their own research as well and make that decision,”

It was the classic vaccine-sceptic position. Yes, vaccines can help, but let’s go slow. Let’s open the door to talk of money, of freedom of choice, of ‘research’ that might lead to the conclusion that politics drive the vaccine movement. Let us, in other words, muddy the waters.

Fast-forward to now. What is the position, the official position, of the Democratic party, when it comes to vaccines against the Coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2? Muddier than it could be, some are saying.

In a series of interventions, senior Democrats have cast doubt on the reliability of any vaccine available soon. Let’s start at the very top with Joe Biden, the presidential candidate. “Let me be clear: I trust vaccines,” Mr. Biden said. “I trust scientists. But I don’t trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people can’t either.”

Mr Biden said later that he would take a vaccine before election day, if the doctors told him it was safe. But the implication was clear: an early vaccine could be suspect.

Kamala Harris, his choice for vice-president, went further. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether Harris would trust a vaccine released by the end of the year, or sooner, the candidate responded, “I think that we have learned since this pandemic started, but really before that, that there’s very little that we can trust that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth.”

Which was not exactly no, but not exactly yes. She received backing from another hugely well-known and respected Democratic politician, the Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, who announced that his state would carry out independent tests on any vaccine: “Frankly, I’m not going to trust the federal government’s opinion and I wouldn’t recommend to New Yorkers based on the federal government’s opinion.”

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The truth about vaccines

By Stuart Ritchie

And just in case Donald Trump were to find a way of importing a vaccine from Britain, that base was covered off too by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, just last week, with a suggestion that British medical regulation was suspect: “My concern is that the UK’s system for that kind of judgment is not on a par with ours in the United States. So if Boris Johnson decides he is going to approve a drug and this president embraces that, that is a concern that I have.”

It is worth saying clearly that the Democratic party, around the United States and for many years, does have a record of backing vaccines. The Republican record is more mixed, and Donald Trump himself has flirted with the anti-vax movement. But what worries some enthusiastic backers of vaccine science is that the Democrats risk undoing the work they have done in the past – and of damaging Americans’ already shaky trust in science and medicine.

The view that Donald Trump might be untrustworthy on medical matters is hardly controversial.   It might make political sense for the Democrats to point this out so that the White House cannot make some baloney claim that a vaccine is ready and if you vote Trump you will get a jab in a few weeks time and your job back and everything will go back to normal. You can see why Joe Biden and his team might want to inoculate themselves against that.

But this is (relatively) subtle politics. What if most people just don’t concentrate that hard on the detail? The risk is that the message they get is less “Donald Trump is dodgy when he promises a vaccine” but more: “the vaccine is dodgy.”

It’s the dodginess, stupid.

One of Americas most prominent anti-vax campaigners isn’t complaining. For Robert F Kennedy, JFK’s nephew, the Democrats’ attitude has been helpful to his cause: “There is undeniably a lot more scepticism about vaccines,” Kennedy said. “It’s gone from maybe 5 to 10 percent to up to 50 percent range.”

He seems to have got that about right. In a national poll conducted for CNBC/Change Research at the end of last month only 42% said they would definitely or probably receive the inoculation when it first became available. That figure has fallen from 58% in July.

And who, politically, has had the biggest change of heart?

An extraordinary collapse in support from registered Democrats contributed to the overall change: only 30% said they would definitely get a vaccine, down from 57% in July.

Mr Zuckerman in Vermont is still an unusual Democrat but scepticism about vaccines – or at least about this potential vaccine – is widespread among the party’s supporters. It has been encouraged by the leadership. If Joe Biden becomes president and a vaccine becomes available he will be accused by the anti-vax movement of raising a legitimate set of doubts, and then ignoring them. It could be a powerful message.

It is pretty certain that no vaccine will actually be available before the election, or in its immediate aftermath. But the political fight may have done more long-term damage, and that is damage that the United States could do without. As Andy Slavitt, a former Obama administration health official, put it recently: “Done right, vaccines end pandemics. Done wrong, pandemics end vaccines.”

The politics of vaccination is a high-risk area, with a danger of unintended consequences. The Democratic party has done what it felt it had to do, but American doctors have been given yet another reason to furrow their brows.

Our interrogation of the data in late September (Is Donald Trump toast?), left me so convinced, I went off and put some bets on high Electoral College totals for Joe Biden – mostly on 330-360 EC votes but a flutter on the two bands either side, including 360-390 votes (a candidate needs 270 to win). Ten days ago I got 12 to 1 odds, now the odds have been reduced to 8 to 1, meaning that pundits now see the chances of a huge Biden win as significantly less remote.

The polls we do have from the past few days suggest that, if anything, the President’s sojourn at Walter Reed hospital has made things even worse for his electoral chances: Biden’s lead has widened and other surveys indicate that voters think Trump could have avoided getting infected if he had taken the virus more seriously (including half of registered Republicans), and that since the President became sick, Republicans are more, not less, worried about the pandemic.

More from this author

Is Donald Trump toast?

By Freddie Sayers

This is the context in which we have to interpret the President’s somewhat surreal communications over the past few days. First, there was the uncharacteristic note of hesitancy, that crept in on Friday and Saturday when he was moved to hospital. “Going well, I think,”was his first message, with that atypical caveat, and later, in his four minute clip from Walter Reed, he caveated again, “you don’t know, over the next few days, I guess that’s the real test.”

There was lots of talk of LOVE and the how a “bipartisan consensus was a beautiful thing to see… I won’t forget that.” By Saturday evening you could almost be forgiven for thinking he might emerge somehow softened and with a note of humility — how would “nice Trump” do with voters?

But by Sunday, the tone had changed again. Instead of ‘feel the love’, the mood was now ‘see the light.’ Along with a much-criticised drive-by, he said he had “learned a lot about Covid” by “going to school” at the hospital. Then, finally, with yesterday’s messages and his return to the White House, there was a new clarity: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”

The slow-mo montage of him flying back, removing the mask and saluting the helicopter from the White House balcony — to stirring soundtrack, naturally — does give a strong indication as to how the President will present himself in the final weeks of the campaign: he’s been there, done battle with the virus, and conquered it. Trump’s about to turn the rest of this campaign into a referendum on Covid-19. Strange as it may seem, it’s probably his best and only shot at retaining the Presidency.

pic.twitter.com/Sn4yTTg8eB

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020

Already, British commentators have been confirming the consensus view to the New York Times: that Covid-19 was a political disaster for Boris Johnson, and will surely be so too for Donald Trump.

But the contrast between the two could not be starker. The week when Johnson was in hospital was genuinely frightening and changed the national attitude to this crisis permanently — the high point of national fear was during that fortnight — but what was surprising was how little the Prime Minister exploited its symbolic potential. Had he emerged full of life, with talk of not being afraid, the whole story might have been different; he might even have finally become the leader he has always hoped to be.

As it is, he survived, but seemed defeated by the virus — he has cut a faltering, timid, hollowed-out figure ever since, and (despite an attempt to rediscover some vigour in this morning’s party conference speech) has presided over a Government that fittingly matches the same description.

We like to think, in our sophisticated democracies, that we no longer place much store in the symbolic power of our leaders — the idea of l’ètat c’est moi perished along with Louis XIV — but if anything, the Boris Johnson experience since his illness suggests the opposite. One can’t help but think the national loss of confidence is inextricably bound up with the prime minister’s loss of confidence. 

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How Boris became the body politic

By Matthew Sweet

Which is why Covid-19 could still just about come to Donald Trump’s rescue. Provided he doesn’t relapse and is actually recovering — the footage of him apparently breathless upon his return to the White House is not encouraging — the idea that he has had the virus and thrown it off will inevitably endow him with a certain authority. If he now downplays the threat, Democrats will accuse him of dangerous ‘anti-science’, but in truth they are as guilty as the other side of politicising the issue. Doubts about blanket shut-downs in response to the virus are not irresponsible, but are entirely legitimate points of discussion in a free society.

Meanwhile, anxiety about the virus remains high in the States, but it has drifted down from its August peaks. And as every day goes by, with children in and out of school, students’ college experience ruined, and thousands of businesses folding, the sense of grievance in America will only grow. So what if the President were to campaign on a promise of moving to a policy of individual responsibility regarding Covid-19? What if he attached it to something like the ‘focused protection’ strategy proposed by the three epidemiologists we interviewed yesterday? After our interview, the three scientists met the Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Capitol Hill: could the administration be taking their ideas seriously?

Back in June, I suggested that Covid-19 could help Donald Trump get re-elected:

“An election campaign in which Democrat voices are endlessly calling for further restrictions… while Trump is promising freedom and a return to the ‘old normal’, sounds like a fight he is aching to have. Not even Make America Great Again – just Make America Normal Again.”

It is probably too late. Real movement during election campaigns happens less often than people think: the YouGov US election forecast has barely moved throughout this drama. I’m not selling my bet yet. But if Donald Trump can recast this campaign as a choice between years of facemasks and shuttered town centres with Joe Biden, and a reinstatement of freedom and individual responsibility with him, it could be the best chance he has of a late change in the course of this election.

But Joe Biden is no street-fighter. He’s a well-mannered, decent, slightly absent-minded old thing whose strongest registers of aggression are dismay and irritation. When he wheeled out that line he sounded like a pensioner complaining crossly that someone had spilled his Sanatogen. And that, regrettably, was the story of last night’s debate: a man who brought a sponge to a knife-fight.

Trump didn’t sound presidential — of course he didn’t — but he sounded fully himself. Everything that his opponents hate and his supporters adore was abundantly in evidence. Trump gonna Trump, right? He’s a known quantity in all this.

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Joe Biden is no radical

By Michael Tracey

Oratorically, one of his strengths is the fact that you don’t know what’s going to come out of his mouth, and nor does he, and when it does it’s frequently either fascinatingly incoherent, dismally mendacious or jaw-droppingly obnoxious. That commands the attention. There are animal spirits to Trump.

And, God knows, there were some things there to stretch the eyes. There was the chilling moment in which, invited to demand the Proud Boys desist from violence, he told them to “stand back and stand by” — as if temporarily benching a football B-team rather than condemning a gang of neo-fascists. There was his categorical claim to have spent “millions” in federal income tax when the record shows he paid $750. This sort of thing could and should have been pressed — with passion and articulacy — by a strong opponent.

But Joe Biden’s ethos appeal — that sense of himself that he projected to the audience — flickered wanly. He was at a loss to make his prepared remarks land. He frequently forgot himself and misspoke. He ambled around issues and weakened his better soundbites by mumbling or affixing long kite-tails of qualifying clauses to the ends of them.

And he was fatally easily derailed by Trump’s constant interruptions. Every time, he’d take the bait and leave what he was saying. “Tell that to Nancy Pelosi,” Trump sneered at one point, and Biden at once hopped off his train of thought to argue crossly about Nancy Pelosi. You know what they say about wrestling with pigs.

From time to time he’d remember one of those lines they cooked up in the basement and he’d have a bash at delivering it – or he’d make a stagy attempt to laugh condescendingly at his opponent. Most stagy of all was his use of apostrophe. Every now and again he’d make a point of looking right down the camera and speaking direct to the voters at home. “You! The American people! You!” he’d say. He’d even reach out with his hands towards them. “How many of you at home have an empty chair because you’ve lost somebody to Covid?” You could see, in those moments, the tatters of that plan of action which, famously, never survives the first contact with the enemy.

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How Trump could refuse to go

By Daniel Baer

And even when he experienced a spontaneous flare of emotion, his good manners undermined the strength of the outburst. “It’s hard to get any word in with this clown,” he said. Signs of life! But then he remembered himself: “Excuse me, this person.” And when he was talking with real passion about his late son Beau— “He was not a loser. He was a patriot. And I resent…” his crescendo was cut off as Trump derailed the conversation with a sneering reference to Biden’s other son Hunter’s former cocaine habit.

Trump, I’m afraid, got to him. A matador was needed, here — or at least a picador— but our guy got flattened by the bull. Trump demanded: “Name one law enforcement group that supported you. We’ve got time.” Biden, blindsided: “We don’t have time.” Later, in a segment on the environment, Trump started inveighing against the “10 trillion dollar” cost of the Green New Deal. Biden protested that the Green New Deal was “not my plan”. Then he found himself saying: “The Green New Deal will pay for itself going forward.” Hang on, Chris Wallace said: I thought you didn’t support the Green New Deal. “I don’t support the Green New Deal,” Biden corrected himself. “I support the Biden plan.”

And sometimes he got to himself. He started a run of anaphora at one point, beginning successive sentences with “This is a guy that… this is a guy that…” and then simply lost his thread, mumbling into his chest, “Anyway, it’s all true.” This is not a problem that frequently afflicted Barack Obama.

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Of course Trump can win

By Sam Leith

Rhetorically speaking, the whole event was what Joe Biden would have been too well mannered to call a shitshow. Ostensibly a highly artificial, highly structured debate — six 15-minute segments, with two minutes each at the top of each one — it collapsed into chaos moments after it started. The moderator, Chris Wallace, asked wordy and ill-focused questions, and proved quite incapable of controlling the conversation. The only way to get Donald Trump to let an opponent speak unheckled for 120 seconds — and we can see with hindsight — would have been to encase him in a soundproof box and cut the mic when it wasn’t his turn to speak. Or, we might fantasise, fix him with one of those electric collars they use on dogs.

Like I say: chaos. And chaos is Mr Trump’s natural habitat. A debate like this — even at the best of times is not one in which you expect reasoned arguments and carefully marshalled statistics to carry the day. When they descended into the weeds of the difference between “solicited ballots” and “unsolicited ballots”, or the stats on voter registration, it was deadly. The lines that cut through most effectively in these circumstances are the emptiest slogans. Trump had: “This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen!” Biden had: “Go to iwillvote.com.” It didn’t work when Hillary read out weblinks in a presidential debate — remember her directing the audience to her real-time factchecking site? — and it didn’t work here.

It’s about the vibe. Who seems authentic? Who seems in command? And here — bullying the squawking compere, rattling his opponent, ignoring anything he heard he didn’t like and getting away with it — the person who seemed in command here was, woe to the world, the incumbent President.

If he stands for anything it is the old ways of doing things; those hugs with John McCain after they clashed in the Senate. Joe is Mr Bipartisan. Hell, he even cosied up to racist Senators back in the day as his vice presidential running mate reminded him, before she loved him.

So here’s a radical idea. Could Joe Biden mend the Senate and damp down the fires that are tearing America apart — by giving in?

Not quite giving in: I have in mind one of those moves in martial arts where an opponent comes at you but ends up on the mat, propelled by their own momentum: let’s hear a big Scranton plaid-shirt howdy to Jiu Jitsu Joe.

It would take some heroic political footwork.

First stop: the Supreme Court. And an acceptance that Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s well qualified choice, should become a Justice before November’s presidential election. I know, I know. It’s not going to be easy.

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By Justin Webb

Yes, the court matters. I remember it mattering to me on a sunny Washington DC day in 2008 when a set of rules that had been hampering my rights were swept away overnight. Up until 2008 we had to keep our larger guns “unloaded and disassembled” and hand guns were forbidden altogether in the city.

No longer. The handgun ban went and the bigger weapons could be waved about, or at least kept ready to fire. And while we had never seen the need for a gun, even one kept in a cupboard (we had a flimsy Yale lock on the door and no fear of any kind of crime in our white picket fenced bliss), we did have neighbours who were armed and in whose homes, where my kids played, this would mean a different set of rules.

It really mattered, this change. And it came not from the local DC government. Not from the House of Representatives or the mighty Senate, nor from the White House. It came from the Supreme Court and a decision the justices made in a case called District of Colombia V Heller. It changed law and the practice of law across the USA.

And never mind my gun freedom: if you are a poor woman in South Dakota and you want an abortion, hell yes, the court matters to you.

So far so obvious. The Court has an important role in American life and always has had. I am not denying that. But here’s the conundrum which is lost in the row about whether Amy Coney Barrett should become a Justice before November’s presidential election. The court generally sways in the direction of the zeitgeist. It might occasionally push a little — as with the desegregation of education — or perhaps hold back against the tide as with the more recent granting of the right of corporations to spend what they like on political campaigns, something many middle-of-the-road Americans are queasy about; but the court is a living organism, not a rock. It breathes. Its justices, often to the intense annoyance of those who appoint them, feel themselves to be more than placemen and women.

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Will America ever be great again?

By Justin Webb

Might the Democrats be wiser to let this one go then?  Not just to let it go. Might it not be a better idea to approve Amy Coney Barrett and acknowledge that the reason she is being appointed so quickly and easily by the Republicans is that they themselves — the Democrats — blew up the gentle old system? For they were the ones who got rid of the Mr Smith Goes to Washington-style filibuster that had governed the behaviour of the Senate.

We hear much about Donald Trump’s radical contempt for the system, the conventions of American government, and in truth he is not the most collegiate of Presidents. But the blowing up of the Senate was not done by him. That happened back in 2013, when the then majority leader, Harry Reid, an amiable but steely Mormon, did the deed. Frustrated by the Republicans holding up some lower level judicial appointments of president Obama, Harry Reid reached for the nuclear option button and pressed it.

“The American people believe the Senate is broken, and I believe the American people are right,” he said, adding: “It’s time to get the Senate working again.”

As the Washington Post put it at the time:

“In the long term, the rule change represents a substantial power shift in a chamber that for more than two centuries has prided itself on affording more rights to the minority party than any other legislative body in the world. Now, a president whose party holds the majority in the Senate is virtually assured of having his nominees approved, with far less opportunity for political obstruction.”

Too right. Supreme Court nominees were not included in the 2013 change; but later, when the Republicans were in charge, they did what people predicted they would do — and changed the rules for them too. Again, some Democrats thought it a mistake to force the issue. Neil Gorsuch, a conservative but highly qualified judge had been named by Trump to replace Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice who died in 2016. Gorsuch’s arrival would not change the balance of the court; in fact, he was probably more moderate than the man he replaced.

But the Democrats decided to filibuster, one Senator saying he would do “anything in his power” to stop Gorsuch. So the Republicans, now in charge in the Senate, simply ditched the filibuster for the Supreme Court too. And the power that Senator thought he might wield went up in smoke.

So here we are: the fallout, the damage from the ending of the filibuster, is with us still. It was a decision by the Democrats that led directly to the likely appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the court.

Were they provoked? Hell, yes. The treatment of the Obama presidency by the Republican party was disrespectful to put it mildly. You could argue — almost all Democrats would — that the destruction of the norms of American political decorum come from the Right not the Left.

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Stop crying foul over fascism

By Justin Webb

But here we are. All the pressure now is on the Biden administration – assuming it can ease its way gently into power – to tear the nation further apart. Pack the Supreme Court! Abolish the electoral college! Use majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate (assuming it can be won back from GOP control) to release the pent-up frustration of millions of Americans and seize the nation from the Right.

It’s a view. But it’s a view that sees conservative Americans as lost to the wider cause and the nation, the essence of being American, lost with it.

What, instead, if President Biden pulled the most almighty political stunt in recent American history? What if he asked his Senate leader to allow the Republicans to filibuster once again (the rules can be changed, oddly, by majority vote). What if he agreed to give the Supreme Court a chance to work. What if he promised to respect its decisions and asked in return that it respect the rights of America to change gradually in the direction he favours?

It sounds so quaint as to be utterly barmy, I know. But it’s how America functioned for decades. Joe Biden remembers that and in his heart, I suspect he wants it much more than he wants free healthcare or a bigger minimum wage or higher taxes for the wealthy.

Perhaps it’s too late. Perhaps the old fellow is too creaky. But Jiu Jitsu Joe would be something to see.

So what is the evidence about who is going to win in seven weeks’ time? Which way is the “herd” really facing? Currently the national polls show Biden ahead by 6-8 points; in the battleground states that will decide the election it’s closer, but he’s still solidly ahead. There’s a lot that can still happen, but in the coming weeks are the polls and media narrative more likely to be underplaying, or overplaying the chances of a Trump re-election? To find out, I spoke to some of the world’s leading experts — including one notable dissenting voice.

Watch the full interview below

Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, perhaps the most famous polling website in the world; he faced a good deal of criticism after his 2016 eve-of-election model gave Hillary a 71.4% chance of winning the election (he’s keen to point out that this was lower than many other models — the New York Times had her at 85%, others at 99%). Right now, FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 24% chance of winning, and Biden is at 76%.

“It’s a weird election because it’s a little hard to diagnose exactly what the conventional wisdom is,” he tells me. “There’s a meme that everybody is overconfident on Biden, but in fact… people are quite cautious on Biden.”

“If you go to betting markets, they have Biden as only about a 55% favourite. To me that seems hard to justify, low on Biden. He is up by 9 points — he does have disadvantages like the electoral college but I don’t think that quite computes… When our model was released, everyone kind of nodded and said, ‘70% seems about right to me’ … So for better or worse, our forecast and the conventional wisdom are aligned.”

But not everyone in Washington sees it that way. Republicans tend to think that the conventional wisdom is, once again, under-rating the chances of a Trump victory. The pollster-of-choice for this view is Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar Group. He may be a contrarian voice, but he deserves to be taken seriously: he was one of the few in 2016 to correctly call the crucial Trump wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania. His polls show Trump narrowly ahead, and winning enough of the battleground states to secure a victory in November.

So how is it that his numbers differ so dramatically?

“We think what’s happening is what’s technically called the ‘social desirability bias’ — people give an answer to a question being asked by a live caller which is less about honesty and more about being judged positively by the person asking the question. So when there is a candidate who is polarising that it isn’t politically correct to say you’re for, you tend to give an answer that makes you look best.” He estimates this “shy Trump” effect is between 3-5% and he suspects it could be more, and that “live caller” polling is the method in which the effect is strongest.

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It is not totally clear what methods Cahaly is using to assess the extent of the effect. He says it involves a combination of different polling methods (less reliance on live caller polls, more digital and robocalls) and asking additional questions such as “who do you think the majority of your neighbours are for?” to ascertain people’s true motivations. But the complexity of the method raises legitimate questions.

Another problem with this theory is that if such a “shy Trump” effect were a big factor, you would expect to see it most powerfully in districts that are overwhelmingly Democratic, and where being a Trump supporter was most shameful —  in highly Democratic parts of California, for example. Trump should have outperformed his polls there in 2016; but in fact the reverse happened. Clinton did even better than the polls suggested she would in those highly Democratic areas, and Trump outperformed in strongly pro-Trump areas.

In theory, those polling companies that do not use a live caller method should mitigate any “shy Trump” effect because you are not talking to a real person, but that’s not happening either. Doug Rivers is Chief Scientist at YouGov, an online-only pollster that makes use of its large panel of survey respondents:

“Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up to take surveys and we interview them repeatedly over time. What that enables us to see is the same people at different points in time and whether they’ve changed or not. What we’ve seen is about 7% of the Trump voters now say they will vote for Biden rather than Trump, and there’s only a 1% offsetting flow in the other direction. So that’s a big deal…

“We never had Hillary Clinton leading by more than 6 points in 2016. And we’ve had Biden at a high watermark of plus 11.” The YouGov model comes out with an estimate of 340 electoral college votes for Joe Biden (270 is the magic number needed to win).

This raises the opposite possibility that, in fact, the “herd mentality” in 2020 is underplaying the Biden advantage more than overplaying it. Pollsters and the media are so scarred from the 2016 shock that they seem to be doing everything they can to emphasise the ongoing chance of a Trump victory, and not blithely predict his defeat. Perhaps this effect is suppressing reporting of the Biden lead, and actually he’s even further ahead than is being reported?

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Says Silver: “There was a recent outcome that a lot of people found traumatising for many reasons. You combine that with the fact that people tend to overweight recent outcomes and more salient outcomes — so just from first principles you would think that people might overweight the chance of Trump winning, just based on their emotional reaction. A lot of what they are doing is emotionally hedging.”

At the technical polling level, this could happen by pollsters anticipating another exceptionally high turnout among white working class voters — like the one we saw in 2016 — when they could well turn out in more conventional numbers this time round.

There’s also the matter of minority voters, as Nate Silver explains:

“There’s also a more subtle form of overcorrecting. You take every step to ensure that you’re counting the white, working class, non-college Trump voters, but you don’t take as many steps to ensure that you’re counting hispanic and black voters. There were some states like California and Arizona and Texas where Clinton beat her polls in 2016 — nobody cared because she lost the key states — but there were groups among which Clinton overperformed… We could wake up and say, oh actually, boy, turnout among blacks and latinos was really high, while polls thought it would be mediocre, and so Biden won by 11 points instead of 8.”

The “smart take” you hear most often about the forthcoming election is that Trump is once again being underrated — people somehow feel it in their bones, and the betting markets confirm that, showing a much closer race than the polls indicate. In a way, “you watch, Trump’ll be re-elected” has almost become the new conventional wisdom, and it’s more uncomfortable to predict a big Biden win.

As Nate Silver says, “If I were looking to play the markets and I didn’t have an ethical problem with doing it, I would think the price on Biden is very favourable.” Doug Rivers agrees: “I think the betting markets, which are showing this about 50/50, are underestimating the chances of a Biden win.”

So is Donald Trump toast? “Not quite,” Rivers replies, “but close – he’s browning rapidly.”

The first is Sky’s four-part documentary, Hillary, on her life and 2016 run for the presidency. It is a sad affair, with villainous Hillary sitting in a chair, a victim of everyone, especially herself. She is over-dyed and over-tidied, like a woman trying not to make Donald Trump throw up, though she doesn’t know why. She has been shouted at so long she is shriven.

Does camera-ready mean sex-ready? The way American women dress for television cameras is heavy with self-disgust and shame. Why isn’t she wild-haired and in rags, like the brittle intellectual she is? Here I impose my own narrative on how Hillary should look but this story is full of women who internalise their own misogyny and talk about not trusting Hillary Clinton because they don’t trust themselves.

“I’ll try not to move so much,” is her first apologetic line to camera. She is angry too – that an imbecile beat her in a competitive exam without answering any of the questions; without actually entering the examination hall. She is shouting at the interviewer, but I doubt she is aware of it: “People feel, ‘that you are not authentic’. What is this about? When people say I’m not authentic. I’m sorry if I’m not brilliantly charismatic on TV,” – she isn’t sorry, and why should she be? — “But I’m the same person I’ve always been.” She isn’t. How could she be? What woman is the same at 72 as at 22? Why must a woman apologise for seeking power?

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She knows the answer. The young Hillary is doughty; and needs must. Girls, she says, “didn’t want to get better grades than their boyfriends”. She ran for the presidency of the student council, lost to a man, and did all the work anyway, because he asked her, and “because I was interested”. I wondered if her marriage was no different.

She describes the entrance exam for Yale law school. She sat down and, “These guys started harassing us. ‘What are you doing here? You don’t belong here. You can’t go to law school’. Or my favourite: ‘If you get into law school and take my place and I get sent to Vietnam and die it’s your fault’.” He thinks she is a witch: a witch with a pen. If she succeeds, he will die.

“In those days,” she says, “you got no points for being emotional. You get no points for trying to fight back or defend yourself. When you train yourself like that and then you fast forward into an age where everybody wants to see what your emotions are and how you respond….” She trails off into — “it’s really a different environment”.

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She was the first female lawyer at her firm: “When I was going to court as a young lawyer it was a spectacle. These good old boys would say, ‘oh gosh’. It was like the talking dog. ‘She can not only stand on her hind legs she can clap her front paws’.”

A judge said to her: “Miss Rodham you just look so pretty, stand up there and show us how pretty you look today, just turn around.” The judge sounds like Donald Trump; quite a lot of people in this story sound like Donald Trump, because he is on television, which seems to be the American dictionary. But the child who had screamed at her Republican father, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry a Democrat!” had already gone.

Someone shouted, “Hillary, iron my shirt!” to her at a rally; did he speak for All Men?  “If there is anyone left in the auditorium who wants to learn how to iron his own shirt, I’ll talk about that,” she said. He did know how to iron his own shirt. He just didn’t want to and, as a man, he felt a future Secretary of State should do it for him, if she is female. Men are allowed this kind of entitlement is the moral of the story: women are not. We must be likeable, like kittens. We must save men by ruining ourselves.

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She is still intensely female: she blames herself. “I was too quick to be defensive,” she says, “I didn’t play the game well enough”. I would say the game was unplayable; and that she cannot bear that she lost makes me love her.

The second piece of art is a long dream sequence, or a novel: The West Wing with less shouting, and fewer men. It is Rodham: What if Hillary Hadn’t Married Bill? by Curtis Sittenfeld. It is Hillary’s imagined memoir and the reading of it is an urge for possession. Pageant queens are divided into constituent body parts. Female politicians are divided into constituent character defects and foul passions.

Here, without flourish, in the clear, unworldly style of a second-wave feminist don — the archetype Hillary most resembles, a woman whose dark secret is a passion for paperwork — Sittenfeld imagines a Hillary Rodham who never became Hillary Clinton.

“I was,” her Hillary writes, “a hardworking and not beautiful middle-class Midwestern girl with a mean father. I had never believed the world existed for my enjoyment”. This Hillary is endearing: an innocent. Her idea of flirting is to give a man a Reinhold Niebuhr biography.

Bill Clinton, a charismatic with a Don Juan complex, is vain enough to seek a clever mate; he courts her. But in fiction, he is self-aware. He knows he will ruin any woman: the Don Juan is not a lover but a thief. He tells Hillary, “the thing that’s wrong with me is incurable”. I have never heard selfishness framed this like before: as a disability. Is that how he won two elections?

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Fictional Hillary leaves Fictional Bill, who is corrupted by the absence of her love. They become political rivals, and Hillary’s only moral error, quickly learned from, is a failure to embrace intersectionality as quickly as she should.

Rodham is amazingly plausible until the end. It is a novel about a woman who assumes a mask because she knows she will not survive without it; and then she is hated for the mask she is forced to wear. This dynamic is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the witch trials: if you drown, you are innocent. If you do not drown, you are guilty and can, for variety, be burnt.  She knows it is a lie for they will hate her anyway. It is also a novel about media stupidity – I cringe at the journalists seeking drama before truth – and the electorate’s decadent confusion: does it seek a competent administrator or a narrative to appal them?

Fictional Hillary is not saddled with Bill’s legacy, and she does not benefit from it: “I was not responsible for his behaviour, not even by extension. This absolution was my reward for losing him.” So, the essential conundrum of the real Hillary Rodham Clinton — did she betray feminism with her marriage to become Trump’s “crooked” witch? — is removed. I am glad, because when you bluntly ask the question, you realise how silly it is. This is a better question: Is Hillary qualified to be president, no matter who she is married to? A better question still is: can you define someone by their marriage and call yourself a feminist?

Hillary Rodham Clinton — the synthesis, both married and talented — is a paradigm, which is why it is essential to look beyond her to all women, which is, you will realise if you read about her work, all she ever wanted. What a shame it is that it couldn’t be done; but no surprise.

If you are President Trump (dogless but otherwise conforming to that description) it is simple. As Frank Bruni of the New York Times puts it, you “set yourself on fire”.

“His gratuitously touted instincts are nowhere to be found,” Bruni writes, instead they’ve been “supplanted by self-defeating provocations, kamikaze tantrums and an itchy Twitter finger”.

If it’s possible to have a kamikaze tantrum while digging yourself further into a hole then Donald Trump is doing it.

This all-systems meltdown indicates to Bruni and the Democrats that they’ve never had it so good. Not since Clinton Dole in 1996, has the electoral map looked so propitious. Yes, yes: events and all that, but this looks, four months out, like a slam dunk.

Biden by a landslide in November.

Democrats believe it. Many Republicans believe it. The doyen of the Republican smart set, the Wall St Journal columnist and former Reagan speech writer, Peggy Noonan, summed it up in two short, much retweeted sentences:

“He doesn’t understand his own base. I’ve never seen that in national politics.”

Her point was that plenty of Trump voters — perhaps half of them — now actively dislike him and his antics. They wanted the second act of his presidency to be more serious, in particular to be about securing the supreme court for conservative values.

Instead they get a never-ending maelstrom. And a court that has just over-turned Louisiana’s effective ban on abortions. Even after two much touted Trump Supreme Court appointments the big victories — the really serious conservative wins that secure the ascendency of the cultural traditions of (white) rural American for decades — are not happening.

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By Daniel Baer

The conclusion reached by all these disparate folk, from liberal Democrats, through ‘never Trump’ Republicans, into the base itself, is that Donald Trump is going to fight a dirty election, perhaps even contest the result, but eventually lose and lose big.

They should know — we all should know — that with Donald Trump there will be twists like you’ve never seen before! Made for TV events that boggle the mind! The promise of a totally new series! Folks, it is going to be way messier than just an election lost. But the wiser Democrats, along with some nervous Republicans, are preparing themselves for the messiest outcome of all.

Donald Trump resigns.

He throws in the towel. All of this flailing about has a direction: the direction water has when a sink-hole empties.

The really interesting thing is that the biggest fans of Trump quitting the scene are some of the more serious supporters of the Donald, or what they thought he stood for. The well-informed Trump-voting blogger Mickey Klaus — the man who first revealed that saintly Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was a scoundrel cheating on his wife — has suggested a plan that may well have legs.

It goes like this. In a reference to a famous article written at the time of the last presidential election, Klaus poses the question ” “What happens if it’s a ‘Flight 93 Election’ and your side is corkscrewing down into the earth?

“…It is time to bail.”

With Donald Trump out of the race he paints a picture of a situation in which passengers rush at the cockpit, and (here the Flight 93 analogy rather fails, but stick with it) eject Trump, thus transforming the election entirely in favour of the Republican party. With Trump gone, the intensity level of the Dem campaign will instantly drop. Millions who might turn out to get rid of Trump will stay at home. The lightning rod having wandered off with all the electricity, everything will probably become very boring very quickly. The Democrats’ nominee is so weak that Republicans, depending on whom they picked, might still have a chance at retaining the White House.

There are of course plenty of Republicans who have wanted Trump to go during the course of his presidency. But I cannot stress enough that Kraus and those who agree with him are not ‘never Trumper’ Republicans opposed to the President and seeking now to bring the party back into the mainstream.

They are the opposite. They want to secure Trumpism, which they see as an aggressively pro-immigration restrictions, pro-American jobs, anti-China and anti-foreign entanglements agenda. Proper populism. And they fear (rightly probably) that a big defeat will lead to a situation where Mr Trump booby traps the White House and jets off into the sunset and the Republican party clears its throat and moves on, moves Left.

How do they stop this? They act NOW. Perhaps with Mike Pence, the vice president or perhaps with some other character sprung from a TV studio in time for the party Convention at the end of August. There is already a name in the frame: step forward Tucker Carlson, the host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News (of course).

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Mr Carlson has veered in recent months into a fascinating area of political space: attacking Donald Trump from the populist Right. Specifically, he called out the White House for failing to clamp down more vigorously (with troops perhaps?) on the Black Lives Matter protests and the riots in some cities.

There’s even gossip — via the Politico website — that Carlson is pally with a man who has the ear of the President but a scratchy relationship with his advisors: “Carlson has established a friendship,” Politico says, “ with Donald Trump, Jr., according to a source familiar with their relationship.”

Whoever it is, the first item on their agenda is a no-brainer. They must find a way to pardon Trump senior or make it plain that they will. As Robert Kuttner of Brandeis University put it recently: “Mar-a-Lago isn’t Elba, much less Saint Helena, but it sure beats the Oval Office.” In other words this Napoleon needs an exile plan. He needs his lawyers to buy into these arrangements in order that he can be sure of living out his days in relative freedom.

That is not as easy to sort out as it might seem because the US federal system makes it nigh on impossible to stop individual states prosecuting crimes they believe were committed on their territory. Vice president Spiro Agnew is a case in point: when he was forced out of office in 1973 and did a deal in lieu of prison it was all sorted out with the federal authorities because his offences were federal not state crimes. Donald Trump has New York to contend with: property deals, loans, tax issues.

Worse: quite a few of the things he might need sorting date from before he was President, so his people cannot even be sure of a presidential get-out clause in an off-to-Elba scenario.

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Hang on though, is this really a serious scenario? One Senior correspondent on Fox News, Charles Gasparino, claims to have talked to people who think it may be: “Over the weekend I spoke to a sample of major players; one described Trumps current psyche as “fragile”. Gasparino tweeted a few days ago. “I’ve heard the talk but I doubt it’s true,” another said. “My bet is, he drops if he believes there’s no way to win.”

There is still a way to win. There are new Trump voters to be found among the huge numbers of Americans who do not vote. It is possible, too, that ‘shy Trump support’ — un-noticed by the opinion pollsters — is a thing. And, of course, Joe Biden is no superman. But these are febrile times.

And in the modern world political movements gather pace fast.  Mickey Klaus makes a telling point:

“I admit,” he says, “ I also called in Newsweek for Michael Dukakis to drop out in 1988, long after the convention, on the grounds that he was losing and his running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, would do better.

“Was I wrong?”

He was not wrong. Dukakis went down to historic defeat to George W Bush. Bentsen could have won. This is why the ‘will Trump resign’ question is more than a gossip line for bored political nerds: it is plainly possible, but with what impact? If he walks he throws the nation into a new and even more unpredicatable tumult.

He might like the sound of that.

Voter turnout was the highest in US history — a whopping 82% — but not in Colorado. Instead, with neither the money nor infrastructure to hold a presidential election, Colorado’s newly formed legislature designated the state’s three electors for Hayes. It is well known that according to the US Constitution, it is the members of the Electoral College who ultimately select the President and Vice President of the United States. It is not so well-known that the Constitution also gives state legislatures the authority to choose how electors themselves are designated, and there is no obligation to do so by popular vote.

Back in 1876, Tilden won an outright majority of the national popular vote. But, after controversies surrounding the electors from South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida and Oregon, Hayes emerged victorious from the electoral college, winning by a single vote, 185-184.

It was this electoral result that got me thinking. What if Trump were to exploit procedural ambiguities and use his bully pulpit to hang on to power? With a slew of recent polls in the United States suggesting his re-election prospects are imperiled, and knowing what we know of his character, it’s a reasonable question to ask. He is a man so obviously driven by greed and pathological narcissism and so unconstrained by law, decency, or the norms of our democracy, that he could try anything to remain in the White House.

And so, with 1876 in mind, I sketched out one possible nightmare scenario…

The Set Up

Our story is already in train. It begins with Trump’s baseless attacks on postal ballots. The technical administration of American elections is decentralised — organised by states and counties across the country. Nominally, Trump and his political sycophants are trying to stop state and local officials from making voting-by-mail more accessible during a pandemic. But, in fact, the real aim is simply to push into the public sphere the false claims that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud. Each court battle or legislative fight gives them the opportunity to keep sowing those doubts, ready to be harvested later.

At the same time, with public polls stubbornly showing Biden maintaining a significant lead, Trump privately rages but publicly claims the polls are fake news meant to torpedo his overwhelming support. Relying, as usual, on his tactic of projection, he repeatedly claims that Biden and the Democrats are going to play dirty, that they will try to steal the election and rig the vote.

November 3, 2020

Fast forward to election day. Unlike 2016, when Trump and Clinton were blocks apart in Manhattan, this time Trump spends the day at Mar a Lago. After the morning photo op, when he and Melania cast their ballots, he tells reporters that he’s going to spend the day getting ready for a huge victory rally and mentions that there are thousands of Trump campaign volunteers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Arizona and right here in Florida who are watching closely to make sure that Biden and the Democrats don’t get away with anything.

That evening, as polling closes and the first returns from eastern states start coming in, Trump’s campaign sees that the numbers portend a bad night. He’s ahead in Ohio but not by nearly enough. Pennsylvania and Michigan are tied, but they know that tallies from urban areas always come in late.

In addition, while there has not been a nationwide expansion of postal voting, many states have made it easier to request absentee ballots and millions more early votes and mail-in ballots have been submitted than in previous elections. Most states have not been able to procure new machines to count these ballots quickly, and officials have warned that it could take days for final results to be available.

The Trump campaign knows, as the scholars Charles Stewart and Ed Foley have documented, that there is a growing “blue shift” phenomenon, whereby the votes that are counted last (the provisional ballots, same-day registration, and postal votes) tend to tilt toward Democrats. This means that if the Republicans don’t have a convincing margin on election night in key states, then those states are likely lost.

Before midnight, they deliver the news to Trump: they think he will lose Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. Florida too, though that’s closer. Arizona is too close to call and even Georgia could go blue. It’s not a blow-out; Trump has come close in many swing states, but he has lost the election.

“It’s time to talk to our people,” Trump says. Thirty minutes later, he takes the stage at an outdoor rally in Florida, in front of thousands of cheering supporters. The teleprompter has been loaded with a short concession speech — his wife and three of his children stand behind him on stage. He approaches the microphone.

But he doesn’t read the speech. “Today was a very bad day for real America and for real Americans!” he adlibs, “because we won this election. But right now, just as I warned, just like we all knew would happen, Joe Biden and the Democrats are printing millions of fake ballots, they are helping illegal aliens cast fake votes by mail, and they are trying to steal your White House!”

November 4-30, 2020

In the days that follow Trump’s defiant refusal to concede, his supporters protest in swing states, and votes continue to be counted. Enough states are working on final tabulations that neither Biden nor Trump has the requisite 270 electoral votes according to The New York Times, though it remains clear that Biden has prevailed.

Trump holds Ohio. He wins North Carolina, narrowly. He has lost Wisconsin by less than 1%. He has lost Florida by more, but there are already Trump supporters protesting — without basis — that non-citizen immigrants have cast ballots in several counties. Pennsylvania and Arizona are slow to count, but as the votes come in, it becomes increasingly clear that Trump has lost both.

Trump holds twice daily White House press conferences, detailing his allegations of fraud. “Look on election night for a while I was ahead in all these states, but then they magically found millions of ballots and now they say I lost? That’s criminal. I call on the Governors to arrest the fraudsters, and I call on the state legislatures to disregard these faulty tabulations and respect the will of the people.”

Republicans in the Senate and the House echo Trump’s claims and begin to say that the election has been “fishy”. In fact, they claim, some of their members who were deemed to have lost on election day may have been cheated just like Trump.

December, 2020

On December 8, state legislatures across the country convene to formally designate the electors who will represent them in the electoral college. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, despite Trump’s constant cries of fraud, the Republican-held legislature appoints the slate of 20 electors pledged to Joe Biden, consistent with the final outcome certified by the Secretary of State.

A week earlier, however, in both Phoenix and Tallahassee, the Trump-friendly Republican governors had called special sessions to petition for extraordinary measures “to protect the will of the people”. Despite final election results showing Biden winning in both Arizona and Florida, these Republican-controlled legislatures voted to invoke their powers under Article II of the U.S. Constitution to change the manner by which electors are designated (on the grounds that the election was marred by irregularities) and gave themselves power to appoint them under state law (and the governors in both states signed the changes into law immediately). Reconvening on December 8, both legislatures advance the slate of electors pledged to Trump.

Democrats cry foul, but conservative constitutional scholars point out that no matter what state or federal law might suggest, the Constitution clearly accords the power to select the manner of designating electors to state legislatures — after all, Colorado did it without the participation of any voters at all in 1876.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, where Biden’s margin is smallest, the Republican-controlled legislature also moves to change the manner of designating electors, and to approve those pledged to Trump. However, the Democratic Governor, invoking Wisconsin state law, signs and affixes the state seal to the slate of electors for Joe Biden as certified by the state elections commission. The Governor then joins with the Secretary of State and the Democratic minority in the legislature at a press conference to announce the proper designation of electors for Biden. But the Republican state legislature holds a dueling press conference in which they assert their right under the Constitution to invalidate the commission’s role and select their own electors. Trump tweets “thank you Wisconsin! don’t let your governor rob YOUR PRESIDENT!”

Donald Trump immediately declares victory — thanking the millions of “real Americans” who voted for him. Joe Biden’s campaign continues to file lawsuits challenging the actions in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Florida. There are two competing realities — the vote tallies clearly show that Biden has won the election — with Wisconsin, Florida, and Arizona he has 319 electoral votes to Trump’s 219. But Trump claims that the real tally is 270 to 268, and that when the Congress counts the electoral votes, he will emerge victorious.

January 6, 2021

While multiple lawsuits continue to work their way through state and federal courts, the Senate and House — sworn in just days earlier — convene in Washington. Democrats have failed to take back the Senate, although they have narrowed the gap — the Senate is now 52-48, including the two Independents who caucus with Democrats.

The Electoral Count Act—first passed in the wake of that same contentious election of 1876—specifies rules for the counting of electoral votes, and for how to handle objections. Congress convenes in a joint session on January 6, after the new Congress has been installed but before inauguration, and state-by-state, records the tally. Objections are adjudicated in separate votes of the House and Senate.

When Congress convenes to record the count, objections are made to the electors from Arizona and Florida, but Republicans argue that because the state law for designating electors was duly changed more than 6 days before the Electoral College met, the electors’ votes are legitimate under section 5 of the Electoral Count Act.

So everything hangs on Wisconsin, and, in essence, a contest between the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act. The former accords state legislatures the power to determine how electors are chosen. The latter specifies that when there are two returns from a State, and when the House and Senate cannot agree on which is legitimate, then the return that has been certified by the executive (governor) of that State should be counted.

What happens then? As new lawsuits are filed and expedited to the Supreme Court, injunctions prohibit the counting of Wisconsin’s electoral votes. Neither Trump nor Biden has the 270 recorded electoral votes.

According to the Constitution, if no candidate reaches a majority in the Electoral College, then the election of the President falls to the House of Representatives. Democrats have held their majority in the House — more than 20 seats. But there’s a catch: according to the Constitution, in selecting the President, the House votes not by member, but rather by state, with each state delegation receiving one vote. And, just as in 2020, while Democrats hold a majority in the new Congress in 2021, a majority of the state delegations are Republican — 26 states have more Republican members than Democrats, and in Pennsylvania, there is a tie.

Speaker Pelosi delays calling the House to order, trying to give more time to the Supreme Court to resolve the issues. But Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy goes to the House floor with all Republican Members and begins announcing the votes for Trump of each state where Republicans hold a majority of the seats. When Liz Cheney, Wyoming’s sole House Member, announces Wyoming’s support for Trump, McCarthy declares that the House has spoken and 26 States have voted for Donald J. Trump.

Trump tweets: “George W. Bush didn’t like my first inaugural speech—maybe I won’t invite him to this one! See you January 20!”

Suggested reading

How Trump is fixing the vote

By Justin Webb

So: could it happen? It is pretty unlikely, even nigh impossible. But I sketch it out to underscore the perilous moment that we find ourselves in. Law can be an unreliable guide even when facts are not contested. And the Electoral Count Act is a largely untested law (it’s last major moment in the spotlight was during the contested 2000 election and the Bush v Gore Supreme Court decision). Meanwhile, President Trump has repeatedly shown that he is willing to lie — about the size of his inauguration crowds, about his poll numbers, about voter suppression, about postal voting — in an attempt to undermine public confidence in observable facts.

So my scenario invites two questions: would Trump try to refuse to accept the results of an election he’s lost? And could he be successful?

On the second question, the President has shown a surprisingly durable ability to enlist accomplices and maintain support of Republican elected officials who serve as accessories to his many misdeeds, but the warping of election outcomes through law, though technically conceivable — as I attempted to map out — would require a new level of complicity.

For starters, it would require a pliable Supreme Court — which, in recent weeks, has shown that it is willing to take decisions at odds with the President. Trump tweeted last month:

Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020

It seems like a good thing that Trump doesn’t think that even the Court’s conservative members are automatically on his side. Senior leaders and former military chiefs have also made statements that ought to give Trump pause in thinking that he could enlist them in an illegitimate effort to hold on to power.

And even though Trump’s past actions mean that we must take the possibility of his bad behaviour seriously at every turn — the answer to the first question is probably also no.

If he loses, he will probably claim that the election was rigged against him and do his utmost to further undermine confidence in our democracy. But my hunch is that he will go. After all, he doesn’t seem to like the job, he will doubtless relish the idea of mobilising his base against a Biden presidency and, as a human being, he is demonstrably consumed by insecurity and cowardice. It’s a potent combination.

Perhaps, if Biden wins, the departing President will take inspiration from Samuel Tilden, who did not fight the result of the 1876 election (despite the fact that he won an outright majority of the popular vote and remains the only presidential candidate in to have done so and not been inaugurated). When Tilden died, 10 years later, he had his gravestone engraved with the words “I Still Trust in The People”.  Trump could use it for a new TV show in 2021.

For years, Ukraine has been Russia’s disinformation laboratory, the Cassandra of the information war. And what does this glimpse prophecise? It should warn us that despite greater public awareness, increased attention from social media platforms, and millions of dollars of government investments to counter hostile influence campaigns, disinformers in Russia and other adversarial states have not been deterred. They have adapted. And now the American presidential election is in their sights.

I was living in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, before the last US election, in 2016. Disinformation was already part of daily life there; I watched as the country attempted to defend itself against Russian attacks, not only on the physical battlefield, where a war that Russia instigated claimed thousands of lives, but in the information space as well. These attacks showed no signs of letting up in Ukraine, or across Europe. If anything, online warfare was intensifying. It seemed that every day a Ukrainian was telling me the United States ignored Eastern and Central Europe’s struggles at its own peril. Information warfare does not respect international borders. I knew it would reach us soon, too.

Further reading

How Covid-19 could get Trump re-elected

By Freddie Sayers

Revelations about the extent of Russia’s influence campaign and the vulnerability of American society to disinformation did indeed flood our collective consciousness after election night. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s collusion investigation details the Internet Research Agency’s now infamous “social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States”, as well as the Russian intelligence service’s hack-and-leak operations, and attempts by the Russian government to influence the Trump campaign itself. 

But the United States’ and its Western allies’ understanding of the disinformation concept has barely evolved since it first entered collective awareness four years ago. You can tell by the language used. In unsophisticated fashion, governments and media outlets still describe Russia as having “hacked” the US election. They discuss Russian “bots” and “trolls” interchangeably, without knowing what either word means (a bot is an inauthentic automated account controlled by lines of code; a troll is controlled by a human). Russian ads spread “fake news,” they say, and they’re ready to do it again.

The trouble is, most of these assertions are misconceptions or blunt shorthand that don’t help voters understand how they are being targeted and manipulated. Russian operatives create informational chaos without the deployment of cut-and-dry “fakes”. In fact, fake news describes only a sliver of Russian influence operations. The most convincing Russian narratives, and indeed, the most successful, in both Central and Eastern Europe and the United States, are narratives grounded in truth which exploit the divisions in societies.

Further reading

The Republican Party's descent into darkness

By Ian Birrell

These truths can be undisputed facts or the perceived realities of life for marginalised populations that Russian operations target. So, in Estonia, in 2007, Russian media amplified and exacerbated the complaints of ethnic Russians toward the post-independence Estonian government about the opportunities available to them as Russian speakers. In Poland, Russia continues to fuel conspiracy theories about the 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and 100 members of the country’s political elite. And as Ukraine continues to pursue democratic reform, Russia’s disinformation amplifies well-founded accusations of corruption, seeking to undermine the post-revolution Ukrainian government and its legitimacy at home and abroad. And American vulnerabilities around race, income, sexuality, and geography continue to fuel Russian operations in the United States. 

Contrary to popular understanding, these campaigns never ran on malicious bots and ads purchased in rubles alone; emotion is their primary currency. This has, in fairness, become clearer to US audiences in recent months as Russia and now China have amplified discord and government missteps amid the Covid-19 infodemic and George Floyd protests.

Even so, Americans and their government have been slow to recognise that disinformers are adapting their tactics. From bot farms in Ukraine, to the co-opting of local organisations in Nigeria and Ghana, and the use of American Facebook Groups to sow discord, Russia has been constantly re-writing the disinformation playbook to make their operations more difficult to track and counteract.

Popular awareness lags woefully behind. This is reflected in our response to the attacks. In its missteps and hesitance, combined with a desire for an easy fix, the United States has effectively abdicated leadership of this critical issue. Where it ought to have been setting the rules of engagement, the tone, and the moral compass in responding to Russia’s information war, the United States has been a tardy, timid, or tertiary player, with any efforts stymied by domestic politicisation.

One consequence of American political acrimony is that its lawmakers have effectively issued social media companies a “get out of jail free” card for their role in the erosion of our information ecosystem, the demise of democratic debate, and their complicity in the spread of disinformation. In Britain, politicians have launched well-informed inquiries and attempted to hold social media platforms to account, and the Government is in the midst of crafting social media regulations that keep users’ democratic rights at their core; but in the United States, regulation has become a partisan issue, understood through the lens of alleged bias on platforms, ignoring the fact that disinformation knows no political party. 

Further reading

What Donald Trump shares with Don Giovanni

By Peter Pomerantsev

As a result, with the 2020 election only five months away, the United States is still vulnerable to Russia. Basic election security legislation, including the Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill that would mandate transparency around online political advertising, languishes in the Senate, politicised by the Republican majority, which refuses to put it on the agenda. Social media platforms have been forced into action by an irate public and are now engaged in a furious game of Whack-a-Troll, removing accounts and networks that clearly violate their terms of service. But they are slow to adapt to the disinformers’ rewritten playbooks. 

The biggest failing of the past four years, however, comes from the US government itself: it has has eschewed its responsibility to protect equitable, democratic discourse at home and abroad. No single US government agency or entity holds the reins in the American response to Russian disinformation at home. And any attempts that have been made — sparse, disparate and uncoordinated — do not have the support from the President or his closest advisers.

In April last year, for example, The New York Times reported that top officials charged with protecting US elections were told not to bring up their work in front of the President, who views any discussion of Russian interference as an attack on the legitimacy of his administration. Even outside of this, there is a stark incongruity between what the President says and what his administration does. How can US allies, or moreover, the American people, trust that the Trump administration’s efforts to protect the democratic process are adequate or legitimate when Trump praises and jokes with Putin?

Even if Trump were to give a speech from the Oval Office today decrying nefarious efforts to influence our democratic process, urging Congress to fund election security measures and pass common sense online advertising regulations, we would still be on the back foot. That’s because he defines the problem as something being done to us, rather than a weaponisation of our own weaknesses.  

The investments we so desperately need to repair the fissures in our society that bad actors manipulate — in media and digital literacy, critical thinking, civics, and journalism as a public good — have been neglected at best. More often, this administration has actively divested from these projects. 

Until our elected officials begin to once again respect the truth, then, it is up to us, the people — at protests, in the voting booth — to remind them it exists. It would be easy to check out, to seek entertainment instead of information as many of us have done during the incessant flow of coronavirus information over the past three months. It would be easy to shirk our civic duties and ignore democratic discourse entirely. But unless we want to live in an autocracy, it really is time to make sure we are heard.

This essay is adapted from Nina Jankovicz’s book, How to Lose the Information War, which is published by Bloomsbury on 9th July.

Rather than celebrate it, an angry white mob descended upon the city and committed what in any other context would be remembered as ethnic cleansing. Entire city blocks were burned to the ground and at least 300 black residents murdered; the exact numbers may never be determined.

This weekend, 99 years later, angry mobs were on the streets again, as the United States rose up in protest against the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black American, by Derek Chauvin, a police officer.

These two moments, nearly a century apart, demonstrate an enduring reality for black Americans. We are consistently told that we must stop our own oppression, and do so in a way that is acceptable and not too jarring for the rest of society. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Dress, talk and act properly. If you must protest, do so in the most peaceful, least disruptive way possible (which is not at all how protests work). And even then, after black Americans employ all these peaceful forms of protest and self-empowerment, they are still met with opposition from angry white Americans who oppose changes to the status quo.

Sometimes, this opposition has been blatant and direct, ranging from the mobs that descended upon Tulsa in 1921, to the white supremacists at Charlottesville in 2017 who were heralded as “very fine people” by President Trump — despite their killing an innocent anti-racism activist and injuring many more.

Suggested reading

2011 birthed the mother of all protests

By Christopher Rhodes

At other times, the opposition to black equality has been faceless. I’m thinking of the Jim Crow laws of the American south which legalised discrimination for most of the 20^th century, as well as also official government policies such as redlining — which deny African Americans home mortgages in more affluent or white neighborhoods, as marked by literal red lines drawn on city maps. These latter policies ensured that wealthy black communities like the one in the Greenwood District would be much harder to create and that black wealth would be only a fraction of white wealth for the average American household.

Throughout American history, black America has had the deck stacked against it. Black Americans have, even so, attempted to effect change, or simply fit in with our white neighbours and colleagues, in ways that were deemed acceptable (polite, peaceful, not too disruptive or uncomfortable) by the wider society. But even when we do everything that would seem necessary to gain acceptance – talk softly and in “proper” English, obtain education and professional success, obey the rules to a fault – these are not defences against arbitrary oppression or violence.

Acceptability did not prevent noted Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (a truly respectable gentleman for whom I once worked) from being suspected of “breaking in” to his own house in 2009 and then being arrested for “disorderly conduct” for complaining too loudly about the situation. Nor did achieving the highest office in the land protect the new black President of the United States, who called the arrest “stupid” and was accused of not speaking in a way that was “becoming” or “appropriate” for the president (a standard that somehow stopped being enforced once Obama left office). Fame and success did not protect football players such as Colin Kaepernick, who was blackballed and singled out for kneeling during the national anthem as a polite protest against police brutality; President Trump called on the NFL to say “get that son of a bitch [Reid] off the field right now” to any player choosing to kneel.

Suggested reading

The truth about 'Obamagate'

By Michael Tracey

On the same day that George Floyd was murdered, respectability did not protect Chris Cooper — a black, mild-mannered, Harvard-educated former comic book editor and current bird watching enthusiast out for a stroll in New York’s Central Park. After asking a white woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), to obey the park’s leash laws, she threatened to call the police and accused the “African American man” (as she emphasises) of threatening her. She not only makes the false accusation to the police while repeatedly pointing out Mr. Cooper’s race, but modulates her voice as if in a panic from some imagined assault. It’s all captured on video. Even when we’ve done everything right, threats, violence and arrest are only one moment away.

Despite being opposed at every turn, black Americans continue trying to work peacefully towards change. And the immediate reaction to George Floyd’s death gave hope that this time would be different; everyone from President Trump to Joe Biden and virtually all major conservative pundits condemned Floyd’s murder and called for swift justice.

But when this did not come, and frustrated that Chauvin and his associates had not been arrested, Minneapolis protestors displayed their anger in a generally peaceful way — by all reports, one broken window and some spray paint inflicted at the precinct where the officers worked on the first night of protests. But, instead of working to de-escalate the situation (or, say, arresting the man who killed a detained civilian on video), police responded by “firing tear gas and flash grenades” into the crowd.

After that, the protests and clashes grew in intensity, spreading across an America where many citizens felt that they had exhausted other options and, well, just felt exhausted in general. Curfews had to be enforced, and by the time Chauvin was eventually arrested, the clashes had taken on a more destructive character.

Despite the way that the unrest is being portrayed by Trump, who has labeled the protestors “thugs” (long a racially-coded term in American discourse), the lion’s share of actual violence — not property damage, but injury and death of people — has been inflicted on the protestors, not caused by them. Multiple motorists have purposely driven into crowds of protestors. This includes New York City police officers who were caught on video accelerating into a group of protestors (NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio blamed protestors for being in the way). Police and National Guard troops opened fire into a crowd in Louisville killing a popular black restaurant owner who may not have even been protesting at the time (the police claim they were responding to gunfire, but their body cameras were turned off, prompting firings and an FBI investigation into the event). In all, several black protestors and bystanders have been killed.

Suggested reading

Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

It is interesting to compare the authorities’ immediately aggressive response to the Floyd protests, even during the first few days of overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration, to the tolerance shown by police to armed, white anti-quarantine protestors when they invaded government buildings at the beginning of May. Echoing his Charlottesville remarks, the President encouraged and lauded those armed white protestors as “very good people”. These Floyd protests, by contrast, are “domestic acts of terror” with Trump threatening to implement martial law, even in defiance of local and state governments. Right-wing Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, has argued that the rioting is worse than the offence and represents “oppression” and “tyranny” being committed by African Americans against society (the idea that African Americans are the true oppressors is a new, almost laughable, spin on a conservative strategy of painting themselves as the victims of progressive and minority agendas).

Unfortunately, as the protests endure and are met with sustained repression, the crowds are becoming more hostile. Outsiders — many of them white — have been responsible for much of that escalation in violence, although the identity of these individuals remains an open question — Right-wing extremists attempting to spark a “race war”; far-Left antifa activists, as President Trump has alleged, or whatever this mysterious and oddly dressed hammer-wielding man represents.

Lost, though, amid all the reports of looting and violence, is the reality that in instances where police officials and officers have shown recognition of the protestors’ grievances and solidarity with their struggles, the encounters have remained peaceful.

America declared its independence to protect “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for its citizens. Most Americans take these rights for granted, and fiercely defend them at the slightest provocation. But while, the anti-lockdown protestors were literally allowed to take up arms to protest the temporary infringements upon their liberty and personal pursuits, black Americans have been attempting to just convince society to fully respect the “life” portion of that phrase. The intensifying uprisings currently gripping the country are the latest, desperate but calculated attempt to be included in the principles that have been granted to others but continue to be denied to some.

Suggested reading

How Trump is fixing the vote

By Justin Webb

In the face of racial injustices, non-violent resistance of the type employed by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other Civil Rights protestors has been idealised as the “right” way for black Americans to protest. Across social media, many people have reminded us that even King recognised that “a riot is the language of the unheard”.  It’s also worth remembering that King’s non-violence did not prevent him from being beaten, jailed and ultimately shot in the face at age 39.

As black America continues to be shot in the face for standing up to racism and oppression, perhaps we’re beginning to recognise the limits of passive protest, as did America’s founders. In the words of black labour leader A Philip Randolph, an architect of Dr King’s March on Washington, “Freedom is never granted: It is won. Justice is never given: It is exacted.”

And the protests are sparking pledges of change across the country — Democratic and Republican governors have promised to implement reforms, while corporations, sports franchises and wealthy individuals are pledging millions of dollars for social justice initiatives.

So while not “acceptable” to those currently in power, the current uprising is forcing America to confront the injustices it has continued to enforce, it is rejecting the idea that we must oppose these injustices in the “right” way and it is recognising that we must do what is effective. The ultimate outcome remains uncertain, but the protests are certainly creating an atmosphere in which America sticking to an unjust status quo is no longer “acceptable” to us.

Well Mr Trump of course. When it comes to a choice between political or medical approaches to the virus, Americans are overwhelmingly plumping for the politics. They afford, in that choice, the most basic of victories to their self-obsessed President. Whether they love Trump or hate him, it’s the emotional/political response that matters most to them — as it does to him.

Kool Aid has become bleach: and they are drinking it.

Even perfectly rational Americans have been caught up in a politicisation of virus facts. And so, if you know how anyone voted in 2016, you will also know whether they think opening beaches in Florida is a good thing, or whether an earlier lockdown would have saved lives. You think Chloroquine might be a good treatment? You voted to Make America Great Again. You think everyone should wear a mask? You’re a milquetoast San Francisco dreamer.

Suggested reading

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Anyone waiting for a reckoning — the equivalent of the public enquiry we expect in the UK; blame apportioned, defences accepted or rejected, the results widely disseminated and accepted — will be waiting a long time. No proper accounting for these mad months will ever be possible. However many die. Whatever the long-term economic impact of lockdowns. Coronavirus, in America, has mutated from pathogen to political event. The media won’t help. That the virus has been so politicised is in large part thanks to the intellectual laziness of a class of commentators, fat bottoms sitting on CNN stools, who like nothing better (and know nothing more) than to chat about who’s in and who’s out and who’s hot and who’s cold.

But wait: there is hope. Hope of a vaccine. Not for Coronavirus but for this political and social disease. The extreme nature of the malady is revealing something about how it strikes and how it might be repelled.

The coronavirus pandemic has given students of American society the opportunity to watch, in real time, a giant psychological experiment taking place. They are seeing something much more interesting than the relatively banal stuff about facts not mattering any more or being chosen at will. No: at a molecular level a much more interesting and deeper dysfunction is being revealed.

Suggested reading

Who controls the Covid-19 narrative?

By Douglas Murray

A simple question serves as our microscope. Why are Left-wing Americans more afraid of the virus than Right-wingers? As the writer Ezra Klein has pointed out on the Vox website, this feels odd given what we know about the psychology of being on the Right: fearing threats, being more sensitive to them, and on the Left: welcoming contact with the world, seeing progress everywhere.

“Here we are,” Klein writes, “in the midst of a pandemic, and it’s conservatives seemingly dismissing the danger, opening states and counties prematurely, refusing to wear masks, waving off the deaths of older people as a small price to pay. And, more often, it seems to be liberals who’re locked in their homes, who are warning the worst is yet to come, who are shaming anyone who dares step foot on a beach or forgets to don personal protective equipment.”

Klein talks to psychologists who express a range of views entirely explained — of course — by their own biases. He gets nowhere. Until he turns to a paper written in 2018 which still serves as one of the foundational pieces on Trump and the world he inhabits.

The paper, by political scientists Jeremy Pope and Michael Barber of Brigham Young University, is little short of revelatory. It is, or should be, the central text of modern US politics 101. Here is the conclusion: “group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.”

Alright, it needs some additional colour. What they did, Pope and Barber, was an extraordinary first in the annals of academic endeavour: they used Trumpism as a heuristic device. They noted that The Donald has taken a range of ideological positions on policy issues in the past, so they divided 1,300 conservative voters into two groups and asked them about those different positions, liberal and conservative; one of the groups was told Trump’s view and the other was not. The revelation was that the more strongly ideologically conservative the voter (as self-identified) the more likely he or she was to go in the direction, any direction, that Trump went in. Bingo!

Suggested reading

Can British media steer clear of the American sewer?

By Douglas Murray

To repeat: “group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.” They are loyal to Trump. They want him to win every battle. Identity groups want to further the causes of the group: in the complex real world they may care about science, or income tax or anything, but in their gut they know who they are, where they belong, and only this matters.

So if Trump wants the borders closed: cool. If he wants the shops open, amen. If he thinks Xi Jinping is doing fine, attaboy. If he decides the virus is a Chinese plot to destroy the world: makes sense to you.

But here is why the Coronavirus might allow the Pope and Barber paper to be freshened. It concentrated on Trump and his people. Perhaps the authors rather assumed — as political science professors at major American universities tend to — that on the Left, in the moderate centre, no such identity trap exists.

Well Hello Coronavirus Times! While Joe Biden sits largely un-noticed in his basement trying to work out how to use his autocue, Americans on the Left have binged on disaster, to the extent that the comedian Bill Maher was forced to issue a warning to his natural pals: “Trump calls you Fake News: don’t make him right!”

He had in mind the ‘panic porn’ of the mainstream media. Headlines declaring ‘war zone’ conditions next to a picture of a person buying eggs. A news story in the New York Times about how things had been turned round in that city, but with the headline, ‘Braced for apocalyptic surge, New York avoids worst so far.’

Maher had done some research. As he saw it:

“The media also seems obsessed with finding young people who’ve died of COVID-19. The Washington Post says there were 759 under 50 years old. Horrible, of course. Then I looked up how many under 50 died of the flu last year, almost 3,000. So, all this misery from distancing did some good, can I be happy about that?”

No of course not. Because the American Left is as subsumed by identity group needs — mostly the need to be the opposite of Trump and his people — as is the Right. The myopia is cross party. There might be talk of ideology, of the policies that spring from deeply held beliefs about how life should be lived and a modern nation governed, but none of that matters much any more. Beat Trump. He has talked the virus down so talk it up. That’s it.

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The vaccine for this virus — the political one — will almost certainly take longer to develop than for coronavirus. But we understand at least what the process of infection is: the challenge will be to find a serum of balm that might be injected into the body politic that allows that inflamed identity protein (sorry) to be blocked or reduced, and healthier political instincts encouraged. The post Trump world needs to think about civic education. About a properly just society which works for all Americans. About a return to due process after the horrors of the campus culture that destroys on a whim.

It will take two women: Joe Biden’s successor (his vice president will be a woman) and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina Governor and ambassador to the UN who I think is likely to be the Republican best positioned for the delicate task of rescuing the GOP from Trumpism. Is it too much to hope that they might be able to disagree agreeably and to persuade the nation to do that much missed bipartisan stuff again?

Cards on the table: I am enormously optimistic. America’s ability to put ideas to good use is one of its central features. So is its ability to produce the sort of people who rise the task. Many presidents have been great and visionary: FDR, JFK, Reagan, Obama. Again and again America makes a mess but it clears it up. Or clears up the messes created by others. In that vein, it may well provide the first vaccine for coronavirus and inoculate the world.

Then (post Trump) it can get on with the job of curing itself.

What, in other words, if the coronavirus is the icing on the voter suppression cake?

We tend to think of presidential elections as battles fought over character and policy, or, in the Trump era, bombast and insults and drama. It’s a performance and the campaign, however horribly unserious it might be, matters. But 2020 might not be about any of this. It might hinge, to an extent that few fully grasp, on a turnout reduced — suppressed — to a level unseen in recent decades.

The commentator Jonathan Chait is among those Left-wing Americans who have noticed and are sounding the alarm:

“It’s not clear,” he says, “If Democrats have fully grasped the gravity of what Trump and his party are attempting to do. The coronavirus poses a threat to elections in general, but a special threat to urban voters, who tend to face more crowded polling stations …… Republicans have calculated that the public-health threat of the virus will suppress the urban vote for them. All they have to do is block any changes to the election system [intended to offset the effects of the virus on voting habits] and allow nature to run its course.”

Voter suppression down the ages has pretty much been a deniable misdemeanour — “we just want to secure the integrity of the ballot for everyone”. Even in the bad old days down the racist south there was some nonsense mouthed about literacy being necessary in order for voters to understand the ballot.  It was about the sacred ballot – they pretended – not about the suppression. But this president has broken with such delicate dissimulation.

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The strategy is blunter in the age of the Donald. The President even outlined it live on Fox News, following the Democrats’ series of suggestions to Congress about postal voting during this time of plague: “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Whoops.

The game has been given away. He wants, clearly and openly, to stop groups who vote Democratic from voting.

Mr Trump isn’t entirely opposed to postal voting: he likes it for the military and for older Americans. Two groups who – surprise surprise — back him. But for everyone else he insists that people should show up at the polls. Or not.

Even before the Coronavirus hit, the stage was set in many states for November 3^rd — election day — to be a time to washing the car, tend the garden, gaze at the sky; anything other than voting. That’s because across all those states controlled by Republican Governors and legislatures the suppression efforts have come thick and fast in recent years.

Not all the initiatives to ‘reform’ voting law are deemed many Americans to be particularly offensive. To take a sample: in Oklahoma they are removing people who haven’t voted for eight years from the registers, which feels to many in that state like reasonable tidying. In Florida, they’re stopping convicted felons from voting until they’ve paid money they owe to victims of crime, which, if you are a victim of crime in Florida, probably seems fair enough. In other states you need proper ID, provided by a government agency.

But these measures mount up: in Mississippi the Democrats think fully 8% of the adult population is currently banned from the polls for one reason or other. Most of them will be Democratic party supporters: poorer people who go to jail more; black people living hand to mouth lives, without proper ID linked to a firm address; youngsters caught out by some special rule about registration.

And even if some of the rules are defensible, plenty struggle to pass any kind of honest electoral smell-test. Among the stinkiest is an effort going on at the moment in Texas to stop ‘straight ticket’ voting.  In all recent elections in the state, with one pull of the lever, you have been able to  back the Democrats, all of them, or the Republicans, all of them. Remember the ballots are long in many states so it’s convenient that you can, with one pull, elect your party choice of judges, school district bosses, rat catchers.

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But, oh dear, mightn’t this lead to a lack of proper thought among electors about the people on the ballot? Well that’s what backers of the change claim, all innocent-faced, as they press for everyone to spend much longer actually voting for each individual candidate.

And the inevitable effect of banning the ‘straight ticket’? Queues. Queues which are already often long, would get longer still. Folk with pressing things to do, poorer people with two jobs, parents due to cook supper, would go home. And they’re generally Democrats. Texas is the biggest state the Republicans can count on in a presidential election: it’s their California, with 38 electoral votes and 7% of the electoral college in 2016. The Republican on the ticket has won every presidential contest since 1976.  But as Hispanic voting grows there are reasons to think Texas might be in play in 2020.

Not if the queues are long, though. Suppression works.

The story so far is a familiar one. It fits into a tradition that dates back to Jim Crow. Civil rights were granted grudgingly and slowly and plenty of black Americans think the battle for proper democratic freedom is still to be properly won. It’s reach is wider than the presidential race, too: comfortable America is none too keen on low-life America getting real power.

It is part of American life. As is the grisly fact that turnout in American presidential elections is low in any case – around 45% of voters don’t make it to the polling station. Lots of Americans don’t need to be suppressed: they’re just lazy or, more often, busy and tired and disillusioned. And Coronavirus will keep even more from the polls — won’t it?

Well in recent days, rather gloriously, the story has changed and changed in a way that cheers those who are confident in the ability of the USA to rise to challenges. You don’t have to be a Democratic party supporter (though it probably helps) to notice and salute what has just happened in still-chilly Wisconsin.

The Democrats tried to get their primary election – and the other polls due at the same time – postponed because of the Coronavirus. Republicans refused. The result was some measure of chaos.

As The New York Times put it, people were forced to choose between their health and their civic duty:

“In Milwaukee, just five of 180 planned polling places are open, leading to hours-long lines of masked and socially distanced voters. This comes as Milwaukee voters — an electorate that includes nearly all of the state’s black population — have lagged well behind suburban counterparts in returning absentee ballots.”

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee  Tom Perez called it “voter suppression on steroids, because it was putting people’s lives in danger”.

But here is the thing.  Americans can be meretricious and fickle and frankly barmy. They can be unthinking about bigger pictures. They can be ignorant about the world. But they are also deeply serious. America has a spine of purpose. People who misunderstand the place concentrate on the froth and the nonsense, the eating competitions and the trashy TV.

But in Wisconsin, faced with what many people saw as a deliberate effort to deprive them of their rights, they queued, in masks, to protect those rights. More than a million votes were cast in person or in postal ballots. Not as many as usual but still a decent number. And enough to make a difference. A judge Mr Trump backed on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was thrown out. It felt to many like a victory for democracy in a state that will be a key battleground in 2020.

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Of course, it may well be the case that Donald Trump wins in November because in Wisconsin and other crucial swing states more voters are enthusiastic about him than about the challenger Joe Biden. He managed, in 2016, to bring people to the polls who had not voted often before, if at all. He is not just about suppression; he has given voice to people who felt themselves to be voiceless.

And Mr Biden, while he is regarded with affection by many Democrats, makes few spines tingle.  When the Fox News host Tucker Carlson asks of Mr Biden, “could he find his car in a three tiered parking garage?” many Democrats shift uneasily in their seats.

So there is still a chance it could be a conventional election. But if the Coronavirus calamity carries on, 2020 could turn out to be an election about what American democracy really is. Will people do their duty in spite of the dangers, as large numbers did in Wisconsin?

In their revolution, in their civil war, in their travails of the 20th century, plenty of Americans died for the ideal of America.

Will they do so again this November?

It was only in 2000, after years of emotive debate, that state lawmakers finally removed the rebel flag from atop the State House. Instead, they raised it as part of a Confederate monument directly in front of the building. It took another 15 years, and a mass shooting by a Confederate-celebrating white supremacist inside a historically black church, for the flag to be taken down completely.

Once every four years, though, South Carolina has the chance to bathe in a more positive limelight. The state’s Republican and Democratic primaries are bellwethers for the directions of their respective parties.

For Republicans, this has manifested in SC voters choosing the eventual Republican nominee in all but one election cycle since 1980. For Democrats, South Carolina has been about showing their candidates can drum up support in the Republican-leaning South.

This means mobilising black voters, who comprise 30% of the state’s population and the majority of SC’s Democrats. Similar demographics face the party across the South, where black voters make up large portions of Democratic voters. The African-American vote has been essential in not ceding the entire south to the Republican Party and critical in other races across the country as well.

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Fortunately for Democrats, black voters have been consistently loyal to the party: well over 80% of African-Americans identify with them; Republican support among black voters remains in the single digits. Unfortunately, however, this loyalty has largely led to the two parties putting minimal effort into courting the black vote. Republicans don’t believe they can win them over (and often because their strategies incorporate dog-whistles and racial appeals to white voters) and Democrats don’t bother courting them because they know black voters have no alternative.

As Elizabeth Warren pointed out in the most recent Democratic debate, “election after election after election, Democrats go to people in the black community and say ‘Boy, we really care about these issues. Racism is terrible, we all want to do something,’” all without offering any “concrete plans” that lead to actual changes.

Warren was bold enough to say what black voters have long known: the Democratic Party takes them for granted. But I predict that a time is coming when the competition for these votes could actually materialise into policy rather than empty rhetoric.

The rapidly shifting primary race is causing renewed focus on the African-American vote. With Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg as the top two finishers in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the previous frontrunner Joe Biden needs a big victory in South Carolina to remain a viable candidate. Biden has essentially abandoned the New Hampshire race to focus on SC, a state he’s long felt confident in winning due to his support from the black political establishment there.

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Biden does recognise the importance of black voters to Democrats’ prospects; but their support is not a given. He would be wise to bear in mind that this loyalty is coupled with political savvy and pragmatism concerning how to allocate that support. In 2008, black voters did not immediately flock to Barack Obama; it was only when his strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire demonstrated that he could be a viable candidate, that their support switched from Hillary Clinton, the more seasoned Washington insider, to the young black Senator from Illinois.

Now Biden, the establishment candidate of this election cycle, finds himself in a similar situation. After his poor showings in the nation’s first two races, Biden’s national support from black voters has dropped by half in the latest poll. He looks increasingly vulnerable. His opponents have sensed blood in the water, knowing that an upset win in South Carolina could knock Biden out altogether.

Bernie Sanders, for example, is increasingly appealing to young black voters there, who are less tied to the establishment than their parents (it was more progressive, young black voters who were early supporters of Obama in 2008 and Sanders in 2016). Billionaire Tom Steyer, otherwise a second-tier candidate, has been pouring millions of dollars into the state and growing his own connections to the black political establishment.

Even Pete Buttigieg has been attempting to woo black communities in South Carolina, as the beginning of a strategy of turning around his own campaign’s poor showing with the demographic.

But it’s not just the race for the presidential nomination that’s made South Carolina, and the black vote more generally, so important to the Democratic Party in 2020. Nationwide, they are in trouble. Republicans have established a solid majority in the US Senate, achieved a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, and dominate the majority of state legislatures; the GOP even has a chance (though not necessarily a great one) of retaking the House of Representatives. Furthermore, despite impeachment and a flailing foreign policy, Donald Trump has remained a formidable foe for November.

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Meanwhile, a number of competitive Senate and House races, as well as the longer-term trends of migration and changing demographics are shifting the balance between conservative “Red” states and liberal “Blue” states; several formerly solidly Republican strongholds states are becoming “Purple.”

These factors, plus the unpredictability of Donald Trump, mean that virtually everything is up for grabs this year. And the results of the last few years have demonstrated that the Democrats’ chances hinge on the ability to not only maintain black support but to actively galvanise these voters.

After Hillary Clinton narrowly lost to Donald Trump in 2016, there was a bitter and sometimes nasty debate about whether black voters lost Clinton the election through abstention (black turnout in 2016 was measurably lower than in 2012, when Barack Obama was up for re-election). While many other factors came into play (including Clinton losing her own demographic, as more white women voted for Trump than for Clinton), there was a noted “enthusiasm gap” for her among black voters.

This gap largely emerged from Clinton’s inability to answer for policies she vocally supported as First Lady and insufficiently addressed as presidential candidate – welfare reform that increased poverty, a crime bill that sparked an era of mass incarceration, and the labeling of (minority) youth offenders as “super-predators”.

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose self-funded campaign has seen him rise dramatically in the polls, especially among black voters, may succumb to similar baggage due to his support for the NYPD’s racially-discriminatory “stop and frisk” policies that he oversaw when Mayor of New York City and only denounced once he launched his latest presidential bid.

To Hillary Clinton’s past mistakes were added the further tactical errors of relying on an older black establishment while failing to reach younger black voters. Black voters realised that Donald Trump was explicitly appealing to those Confederate flag waving white voters who still attempt to bring out the rebel banner every year in South Carolina since its removal. And many African-Americans were simply not convinced that Clinton was offering an alternative that, in substance rather than rhetoric, was much better.

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By contrast, when Democratic candidate Doug Jones pulled off one of the most profound upsets in recent years by winning a Senate seat in the deep red state of Alabama in 2017, Jones’ almost total support among black voters (96%) and particularly black women (98%), and the high turnout rates among these groups, were the decisive factors in this victory. Black voters, and particularly black women, have also come out strong for Democrats in Virginia, swinging that state blue in recent years.

In short, when black voters are enthusiastic, Democrats can win competitive elections, even in the Republican stronghold of the deep South. When black voters are less motivated to come out in force, Democrats lose. So a party that has taken the black vote for granted can no longer afford to do so.

Democratic politicians seem to be recognising this. For decades, Congress has resisted any consideration of the issue of reparations for slavery as well as “Jim Crow” segregation and other forms of discrimination against black Americans (every year since 1989, the late Representative John Conyers would introduce the bill to create a reparations commission, to no avail). Last year, however, Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave her blessings for the House to hold a highly-publicised hearing on the issue, inviting testimony from experts such as noted public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates (whose highly influential article “The Case for Reparations” had several years earlier revived the public debate over redressing slavery and subsequent racial discrimination) and prompting several presidential candidates to endorse the endeavour.

More generally, the Democratic candidates have been adding some much-needed specificity to their appeals to black voters. Tom Steyer has strongly endorsed reparations for African-Americans. Amy Klobuchar made a point during the most recent debate of calling out voter-suppression efforts in various Republican-controlled states that are “discriminating with surgical precision against African-American voters”.

Bernie Sanders, who continues to approach nearly every issue through the lens of economic justice, is careful to highlight the disproportionate impact economic and legal inequalities have on “African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.” Pete Buttigieg, whose current front-runner status is bound to evaporate if he continues to struggle to gain traction with black voters, has proposed an ambitious set of policies, called the Douglass Plan after famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. These cover everything from healthcare to education to housing to criminal justice and law enforcement reforms.

Again, these could all fall by the wayside once the election season is over. But given the ways the black vote can make or break elections,  it would be foolish of the Democrats to continue with business as usual. Even Republicans seem to understand this, as noted by Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to peel off black support from Democrats, even at the margins.

And so, on February 29, South Carolina will reshape (and possibly decide) the Democratic race. I still think that Biden will eke out a win there; he knows that the state, and the African American vote, are crucial to Democrats’ chances. As the former Vice President said during a rally in South Carolina as the New Hampshire results were being released:

“Up till now, we haven’t heard from the most committed constituency in the Democratic Party, the African-American community… 99.9%. That’s the percentage of African-American voters who’ve not yet had the chance to vote in America… You can’t be the Democratic nominee, you can’t win a general election as a Democrat unless you have overwhelming support from black and brown voters.”

I think Biden will hold on in SC, but only barely; Bernie Sanders, whose message resonates especially with young black voters, and Tom Steyer, who’s flooded the state with advertisements touting a message of economic growth, racial justice and beating Donald Trump, will most probably come in very close second and third in the race.

South Carolina is the Democratic Party’s first big platform to demonstrate how it will work to earn the black vote. A close result, with several candidates splitting the vote, will show that no wing of the party can take black voter support for granted anymore.

Five years ago, South Carolina finally acknowledged that its Confederate flag was an outdated relic that belonged in a museum rather than a place of prominence in the state’s capital. Later this month, the state may show that unquestioned and unrewarded black support for Democratic Party is also an outdated notion.