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Surprising everyone and everyone, the last US presidential debate was relatively quiet, without so much chaos and constant insults between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. If the Democratic strategy for the debate was “let Trump be Trump,” further damaging the Republican campaign, as Hill advanced, the president did not take the bait. But he also did not have the victory he needed to turn the campaign around, less than two weeks before the elections, back at the polls in more and more undecided states, surpassed by the Democrats in funding, condemned to discuss issues that give him little popularity – such as handling a pandemic, which nearly 2 in 3 Americans disapprove, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Does this mean that it is virtually impossible for Trump to win? Not necessarily. In the complex American electoral system, in which whoever wins a state gets all the votes, only slight fluctuations in the right place are enough to change the balance. Trump’s narrow path to reelection means defeating Florida and Pennsylvania, defending the states he easily controlled in 2016 (Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina and Texas, a Republican stronghold), and staying with Michigan or Wiscosin. The Economist calculations predict an 8% probability of this happening, even Texas is questioned by Biden, but it would not be the first time that Trump exceeded expectations.
“In 2016, his chance of winning the election was equal to that of closing a ladder in poker,” Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican analyst, described to the Associated Press. “The question this year is whether you can close a straight in two hands in a row,” he continued. “Theoretically it is possible, but in practice it is difficult.”
On the one hand, hampering a last minute turn in favor of the president, polls show a very low percentage of undecided voters in an increasingly polarized country. On the other hand, Republicans bet on a gigantic door-to-door voter registration drive, with 2.5 million volunteers, targeting areas with predominantly white populations and no higher education, a demographic that voted primarily for Trump in 2016, for a 25% margin.
Learn to live or die?
However, the Trump of 2016 is not the same as that of 2020. He is no longer a stranger to politics, drawing criticism of the Clinton dynasty. He is a president whose mandate 230,000 people died in the United States and 8.7 million were infected with a new virus, controllable with simple public health measures, such as the use of a mask and social distance.
This Thursday’s debate was perhaps the moment when Trump expressed his strategy on covid-19 most clearly. “We are learning to live with it, we have no other choice. We cannot lock ourselves in a basement like Joe does ”, explained the president looking at his opponent. “It has the possibility of closing, I don’t know, obviously it made a lot of money somewhere. But people can’t do that.
With more than 25% of Americans earning less than in February, according to the Population Survey, with millions desperate for a job, it could be a compelling message. The World Health Organization itself warned of the risk of fatigue with the pandemic, that is, a tendency to overestimate the social impact of measures to contain the virus and underestimate the risk of contagion.
However, with the United States in the midst of a third wave, polls continue to show widespread dislike for the Trump administration, with 66% of Americans fearful of becoming infected, according to FiveThirtyEight. And it seems too late to change that perception in time for the elections.
“He says we are learning to live with this. People are learning to die from this, ”Joe Biden said. At home you will have an empty chair at the kitchen table in the morning. Men and women will go to bed at night, reach out where the husband or wife used to be, out of habit, and they are not there.
“We are just around the corner”, promised Trump, the covid-19 “will disappear.” Biden has already warned: “We are about to enter a black winter. But he doesn’t have a clear plan.
A ‘mysterious’ conspiracy
Not even Trump’s old workhorse, denouncing the corruption of his Democratic opponents, has the same brilliance as it did in 2016. In that year, around this time of the campaign, analysts had already declared the political death of the future president. after being recorded talking about grabbing women by the vagina. Everything has changed with Wikileaks revealing hacked campaign emails from Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, detailing suspected acts of corruption.
This campaign hardly heard the old Trump slogan, which promised to “dry up the swamp.” After all, it’s hard not to notice that Trump, as president, was accused of enriching his office, being bribed by foreign dignitaries who paid for hundreds of rooms in his hotels and even fleeing the US tax office, while paying almost . $ 200,000 in taxes on China, the New York Times recently advanced.
This did not stop the president from pushing the corruption issue during the presidential debate, launching accusations against his opponent. The plot of the conspiracy is complex, unfounded and difficult to follow, but it involves a “laptop from hell”, in Trump’s words, filled with alleged compromising emails from Biden’s son Hunter, delivered to the New York Post by himself. Trump’s attorney. , Rudy Giuliani.
First it was said that Biden would have benefited from his son’s business in Ukraine, then in China, despite the fact that his tax records are public; Fox News even suggested that Hunter Biden is a pedophile. “The whole thing is vague and mysterious to anyone who is not caught up in the Fox News universe,” noted The Guardian.
Trump’s problem is that, although the conservative channel is the most watched in the country, his accusations do not reach the majority of the electorate, not even all Republicans – only about 40% have Fox News as their main source of support. information. information, according to the Pew Research Center. The Clintons, on the other hand, had a much more credible scandal than Biden and decades of suspected corruption over them. “You have to realize that a trick that worked once doesn’t always work,” New York Magazine suggested to the president.
Or missing wall
The great absence of this electoral campaign is the discussion on immigration policy, which was decisive in 2016. We hardly hear songs about “building the wall”, so popular among the President’s supporters, we never hear him speak of Mexicans as rapists again. drug traffickers. and murderers. Of the top ten Trump campaign themes, it has become the least mentioned in his television ads, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Perhaps it is partly because, after four years in office, the wall never materialized and Mexico never paid for it, after successive Democratic blockades in Congress. At the same time, in the face of the pandemic, immigration has become less of a concern for voters: In 2016 it was a crucial issue for 70%, now just 53%, according to the Pew Research Center.
Suddenly, the political gains from Trump’s harsh immigration speech have waned, but the risk remains of harassing the Latino electorate, a growing demographic essential in Florida, a state the president cannot afford to lose.
“There is a point where real-world events intrude on an election campaign in such a way that they cannot be ignored,” summarized Jacob Neiheisel, professor of political communication at the University at Buffalo.
Plus, it was one thing for Trump to talk about immigration restrictions in 2016, when they were just abstract promises of security and stability; it’s something else when President Trump talks about it, and voters see the concrete results of that policy, the shocking images of children in cages, separated from their families. Biden also has little incentive to point fingers. Not only is he not as mobilizing an issue as it used to be, but he runs the risk that voters will remember that he was a deputy in the Barack Obama Administration, responsible for a spike in immigrant deportations.
“We saw him make some indirect references to failures in public policy, but not that one. I think it’s mainly because people aren’t interested right now, ”Neiheilsen explained to US News and World Report.
The support of the richest
On the remaining topics of the debate, Trump also seemed to be rowing against the current. After Biden promised to increase the reach of ‘Obamacare’, which regulates the prices of health insurance, in a new program that he would call ‘Bidencare’, the president accused the Democrat of being far left and pretending to “socialize medicine.” Instead, he promised “beautiful, brand-new medical care,” a project he has promised since the beginning of his tenure, but the details of which he never revealed.
It’s hard to see how this indictment can translate into election gains for Trump. For the 69% of Americans who support Medicare for All, a more ambitious proposal than Biden’s, a kind of national health care system, proposed by figures like Bernie Sanders, will hardly resonate.
Among the 31% who are against the proposal, according to HarrisX, it can be difficult to imagine Biden, representative of the more conservative Democratic wing, as a figure of the extreme left. Especially when he accumulates more and more funds from Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, something that leaves the Republican campaign in serious trouble and the Democrats further left concerned.
In the past six months alone, the Democratic campaign has received nearly $ 200 million (about € 170 million) in donations of more than $ 100,000 (nearly € 85,000). It’s more than double the amount received in donations over this amount by the Trump campaign, said the New York Times, noting that Biden forgot some donation transparency rules that he used to advocate.
Even Trump admitted to being behind on funding, but bragging that if he wanted more money, he only had to call the CEO of a multinational, like the oil company ExxonMobile – a former CEO of the company, Rex Tillerson, was his first secretary of state. .
Trump began collecting re-election donations the day he took office. Still, Biden’s campaign is crushing him with TV ads, flooding crucial states like Florida and Pennsylvania, according to CNN.
Trump only spent more than Biden in states like Texas and Iowa, which a few months ago no one would have thought Biden could contest. However, “the money, spent on advertising or other things, does not determine a presidential election. If not, Hillary Clinton would be president at this time, “wrote the US channel.
