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After an economic and public health shock, after four years of grueling post-impeachment drama, Americans have emphatically rejected neither Donald Trump nor Trumpism. Even if he loses the White House to Joe Biden, that will be the central lesson of the American election for a watching world, as well as for a nation’s eager liberals.
An unattractive president did a short job with Florida – the Waterloo of pollsters – and ended the reckless talks about a blue Texas. At worst, Trump will lose by a respectable margin. It may still prevail, with or without the legal action that followed in a statement that was no less grim for its predictability.
Naturally, a Biden victory, even a slight one, is a better outcome for liberalism than the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016. But the absence of a landslide victory and a strongly Democratic Senate will hurt. Four years ago, the party could cite excuses and circumstances: an unpopular candidate, an opponent with no political background to attack.
This time, they have no such consolation. Democrats nominated an experienced moderate without objection. They were based on the foundations of public health and prosperity. They amassed a Fort Knox of campaign money. They had the encouraging precedent of the 2018 midterm elections. Above all, they had to pursue Trump’s ethical and administrative record. All the raw materials were there for a landslide victory that would be a purgative moment for the republic: a kind of cleansing.
50-50 nation
Yes, a Californian running mate was never ideal, the choice depends on the Midwest and the Southeast, but there was no clear alternative to Kamala Harris. As for his avoidance of mass political rallies, Biden could hardly run as a killer of the coronavirus pandemic while maintaining them.
At this point in the search for unforced errors, the road turns cold. Liberals are allowed to accept a deeper fact about America. Much more so than when the phrase began to circulate a generation ago, this is a 50-50 nation, more or less.
There is hardly a politician good enough to reward the mass voters of the opposite half of the electorate; the last to win more than 400 votes in the electoral college was George HW Bush in 1988. And there is hardly any act or statement so bad that it cost a politician many votes on his own side. Whatever the pretensions of Washington architecture, politics is now better understood as a high-stakes version of team sport than as the discursive ideal of the ancients.
What’s more, liberals can’t even trust demographic change to tilt 50-50 on 60-40 in their favor. Trump’s apparent advances among voters of Latin American descent (in Florida, for example) are sinister for the left. A more diverse nation is not axiomatically more progressive. Liberalism will have to fight for its future, not assume it.
Half bread policy
The states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania can still be turned for Biden. Arizona has gone from red to blue without much of a transition phase, just as Virginia did in 2008. Yet even these achievements would have hit the Liberals least on the eve of the election. Nor do they amount to any kind of national resolution. A system in which neither party wins or loses too much, or clings to a unified government for long, should be much more peaceful. In practice, this half-bread policy simply deprives whoever the president is of pan-national legitimacy.
Of course, even the narrowest victory can still change the world. It is no more possible to be half president than half pregnant. If elected, Biden could undo much of Trump’s foreign policy, regardless of which party controls the Senate. His election would be held at NATO headquarters and at the foreign ministries of most of the United States’ allies. The executive branch will also be important in the fight against the pandemic. And even an increase in the presidential tone is worth something.
No, if there is a sense of liberal dread today, it is less about the shattered dreams of progressive realignment than it is about Trump’s dismal resilience. For four years, he has lived up to the most dire expectations of the Democrats and remained electorally competitive. Not enough Americans consider him a tyrant or a clumsy, or care in any way. Even if he loses, he has done well enough to remain the benchmark for Republicans in opposition and a plausible candidate in 2024.
And that is the best scenario for the cause of liberalism. The vote count, or a court decision to stop it, can still provoke the worst. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020
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