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Nothing is certain about the US presidential election yet: the vote count is taking time, it is a close race. However, there are already some findings: It is not enough that Biden is simply anti-Trump.
By Julia Kastein, ARD-Studio Washington
1. Polls have yet to find a recipe for the Trump phenomenon
For months it was said: Joe Biden is ahead in the polls. And so clearly that many pollsters and political experts inside and outside the US are already predicting a landslide victory for the former vice. They were wrong. Like four years ago.
Election researchers have obviously not been able to perceive mood, especially in decisive states. Maybe because you didn’t ask the many Latinos who voted for the first time in Miami and voted for Trump, for example? A few days ago, a headline on the online voting platform “FiveThirtyEight” owned by the ABC television station read: “Trump can still win, but only if the polls are even more out of place than in 2016.” This is exactly how it turned out.
2. Trump stays true to himself and his script
The president’s late-night appearance after the election was classic Trump: a mix of false claims (“We already won,” “You want to steal the election”) and insulted whimpers (“We were ready to celebrate our big victory, we.” Won everything. , and suddenly everything was different. “) But in terms of content and strategy, Trump stuck with his script from the past few weeks.
At every opportunity, the president had raised questions about the electoral process and demanded that the winner be determined on Election Day. Trump is particularly outraged by rules like those in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where mail-in ballots are accepted days after the election, as long as they have gone to the post office before the election (rules that would be inconceivable in Germany) . The president had also announced several times that he wanted to involve the Supreme Court, the supreme court, to prevent these late votes from being counted. He is completely dependent on the three conservative judges he was able to enthroned there for the past four years. He boxed the latest newcomer, Amy Coney Barrett, through the nomination process for precisely this case.
3. It will be very difficult for Biden to win the election
It will no longer be a landslide victory. But Biden has yet to lose the election. However, it will be difficult to win: After Trump already won in the important “changing states” of Florida and Ohio with a total of 45 voters, his rival now has to win in at least two of the five states that voted for Trump ago. four years. to have. Otherwise, you won’t be able to rally the 270 voters needed for victory.
By the current tally, the president has a slight advantage in three of them: Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Biden is just ahead in Wisconsin and Michigan. But hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes have yet to be counted, for example in Detroit, Michigan and Atlanta, Georgia. In other words, metropolitan areas where Democrats tend to win. That is why it is now so crucial to Biden and America’s democracy that all votes are counted too.
Four. Being anti-Trump is not enough
In the election campaign, Biden had presented himself primarily as a human alternative to the incumbent: empathetic, friendly, polite. His tragic family history – his wife and daughter died in a car accident, the eldest son of a brain tumor – will surely be familiar to most Americans by now. While Trump entertained (and endangered) his unmasked and distanced supporters at mass events, Biden stayed home for weeks.
Regarding content, it avoided clear positions, for example on the issue of climate protection and the future of controversial fracking. He did not explain exactly how good jobs should be created in the so-called rust belt, the industrialized states of the northeastern United States, through an energy transition. Neither is the need for tax increases for those who earn more. His pandemic response plan remained unclear.
Thus, Trump could easily condemn him as the job killer who cripples the economy while at the same time only going after people’s hard-earned money. Fear of Biden’s alleged “socialism,” for example, drew immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela to Florida. The election results so far have confirmed a poll result: Voters trust Trump more when it comes to the economy. And the economy is more important to many people than a nice and empathetic president, especially now that the pandemic has robbed them of so much of their livelihoods.
