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ANALYSIS: President Donald Trump lost the election, but his bombastic style of conservative populism lives on, leaving President-elect Joe Biden with the momentous task of unifying a land divided over race, immigration, the Covid-19 pandemic and how the nation looks.
Trump has long been a cartoon-like villain to moderates and progressives. But it resonated in another part of the nation, one that gave him 70 million votes and for years he felt voiceless and disillusioned.
Paul Sancya / AP
The president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, has the momentous task of unifying a land divided by race, immigration and the Covid-19 pandemic.
He personified the division in the national spirit, and his presidency revealed how far we had grown apart after decades of a Washington increasingly removed from the lives of those he represented.
Although Biden was victorious on Saturday (local time), the election was both an overwhelming repudiation of Trump and an endorsement of his Republican Party reform.
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There was no blue wave. Trump has surpassed his total from the last presidential election by more than seven million votes. Republicans won House seats, held onto state legislatures, and were able to retain the Senate.
Evan Vucci / AP
Despite what the polls predicted, there was no blue wave. President Donald Trump surpassed his total from the last presidential election by more than seven million votes.
In case the 2016 election left any doubt, the 2020 election confirmed that Americans live in parallel universes, each alien to the other.
On one side are voters like David Merin, who lives in Newport Beach, California.
His early hopes of Trump taking office were quickly dashed when the president fanned the flames of extremism, disparaged immigrants and fueled conspiracy theories.
“Almost every week, some kind of statement came out of his mouth that, under any other presidency, would have been the scandal of the year,” said Merin, 50. “But they were usurped the next day, or at most, the following week.”
At the top of his list is the president’s handling of the pandemic.
“What else would it take for people to realize how dangerous this man’s lack of leadership is?” said Merin, whose work as an emergency room physician has given her a front-row seat to the suffering brought on by the coronavirus.
When the votes began to come in this week, Merin, who voted for Biden, was surprised that a stronger majority did not follow suit.
“It’s hard to even understand how someone paying attention could act differently,” he said.
Carolyn Kaster / AP
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, speaks Friday, Nov. 6, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster)
But that opinion is just as incomprehensible to people on the other side of the American divide.
Doug Blair, a 63-year-old sales representative from suburban Detroit, said it’s ridiculous to blame Trump for the pandemic, despite the president’s disparagement of masks and public health experts.
Blair said the president deserved a second term, because the economy was booming before the coronavirus and unemployment was at a record low.
“These are facts that matter,” he said. “The other side never wants to talk about this.”
A banner hung on the side of his brick home featured a photograph of Trump and a slogan: “Promises Made, Promises Kept.”
Regarding the Biden presidency, he said: “I shake my head wondering why any American would support him.”
In fact, when it came to the main issues that motivated voters, exit polls found little common ground between Trump supporters, the economy, and Biden supporters, racial inequality and the pandemic.
To explain how Biden received more than 74 million votes and inched forward in various swing states, many Trump supporters have embraced the president’s claim that his election was being stolen.
“It’s a scam,” Tom Vail, a 60-year-old flower importer, said at a small “Stop the Steal” rally this week in front of the Minneola City Hall in Lake County, Florida.
Hundreds of passing cars honked in support as protesters joined him in waving “Make America Great Again” flags.
Matt York / AP
Crowds gather during a pro-Trump rally outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Phoenix.
The rally took its name from a Facebook group that quickly grew to 350,000 members this week before the platform banned it because some members promoted violence.
Trump has offered no evidence of large-scale fraud, and even prominent Republicans have dismissed his accusations as unfounded.
But that didn’t seem to matter to Vail, who echoed Trump’s claim that he was on track to win the election until state election officials cut his chances by counting a large number of false and illegitimate votes.
Vail also said that the media and technology companies were part of the conspiracy, rejecting the president’s claims under the pretext of fact-checking, as they added precision warnings to his posts and similar ones from his supporters.
His wife, Vara Vail, who joined him wearing a “Trump Victory” t-shirt, said the president “had already won.”
Pointing to her own story – she was raised in Thailand by a Chinese father who fled communism – she also said that anyone calling Trump a racist or anti-immigrant “has no idea what he’s talking about.”
The common left-wing claim that racism primarily explains the president’s support was affected in the 2020 elections.
Trump’s strongest supporters were white men, but exit polls suggest he made progress among groups outside his base.
John Locher / AP
Supporters of President Donald Trump protest outside the Clark County Elections Department in North Las Vegas, Nevada.
With nearly a third of the votes cast by Latinos, Trump moved along the Texas-Mexico border and increased his support among the Cuban-American population in Florida, areas that saw some of the steepest changes from Democrats to Republicans this year. . Among black men, Trump got 18 percent of the vote.
Those raises made little sense to Lakayana Drury.
A 31-year-old community organizer in Portland, Oregon, spent much of the summer organizing discussions between police and young black men as protests escalated there and across much of the country following the death of George Floyd at the knees of a police officer police. in Minneapolis.
It seemed obvious to him, a black man, that Trump ignored lives like his and did not see racism as a major problem in America.
Drury wondered how others couldn’t see that, or were they just willing to overlook it?
He voted for Biden, a man who he thought would show “moral leadership” and be “diplomatic” compared to Trump, although he was not “super crazy about him.”
And he clung to a feeble hope that a future president, Joe Biden, could help heal the divisions he has seen in his community and nation.
“I think it starts with someone who can set a tone,” he said. “Now people are very divided. Trump has widened that gap.”
For now, as news of Biden’s victory begins to sink in, the division appears to be growing.
Trump supporters planned to demonstrate at various state capitols this weekend, vowing to keep Trump in office.
“Democrats are plotting to disenfranchise and nullify Republican votes,” said a website for the protests, StolenElection.Us, without evidence. “It is up to the American people to stop him.”
An opposition group, Protect the Results, has organized demonstrations across the country, joining spontaneous street gatherings to celebrate the president-elect’s victory.
Staff writers Emily Baumgaertner in Los Angeles, Kurtis Lee in Michigan, and Richard Read in Oregon also contributed to this report.
– Los Angeles Times
