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NEW YORK. I usually say that history does not repeat itself.
But when it comes to the US presidential election, it is not.
There, history repeats itself in more ways than one.
The historic wings of the 2000 presidential election are being heard more and more clearly.
This time it was so close in Florida that Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush fought for 36 days over who would win.
The battle was fought entirely in court. I still remember driving on a shuttle between my hotel in the state capital, Tallahassee, and the courthouse, where news of new rulings that affected the vote took turns.
Now they are the same shades again. The Trump camp has filed lawsuits in several of the states where it is extremely even, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. Georgia and Nevada.
Among other things, he claims that Republican election observers have not been given enough information about vote counting and that there are illegal votes.
He has sent his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to lead the fight from there. Giuliani looks a bit like James Baker’s role for Bush in 2000.
Photograph: J. Scott Applewhite / TT
The historic wings of the 2000 presidential election are being heard more and more clearly. At the time, it was so close in the state of Florida that Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush fought for 36 days over who would win.
Photo: MARY ALTAFFER / AP / TT
The president hopes that the courts will nullify so many democratic votes that he has a chance of winning the election.
The president hopes that the courts will nullify so many democratic votes that he has a chance of winning the election.
The general opinion among US election experts, however, is that the Trump camp has so far presented very little evidence of wrongdoing or cheating.
Hired in the army
Joe Biden has also hired an army of lawyers to take advantage of any mistakes that may benefit Democrats. So far he has not filed any lawsuits.
The objective of the Trump campaign is to get a verdict that if it does not come out as they can, they can appeal to the next instance. The hope is that one of these will end up in the Supreme Court, where Trump believes he has a good chance of winning because the court now has a 6-3 conservative majority since the president managed to appoint another judge just days before the election.
The president’s objections are not always entirely logical. He wants to stop the counting of votes in some states with reference to the fact that it is a trap to continue counting votes after Election Day. But only in states where Biden is catching up. In Nevada and Arizona, where Trump is stepping in, he wants vote counting to continue. How serious is the current president of the United States?
It is not unusual for US elections to end in court, but for presidential elections to be decided there is unusual. The year 2000 was a wake-up call for many and several measures were taken to reduce the risk of errors in the electoral process.
History also repeats itself in another way.
When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, it was three normally democratic states that decided, with the real estate billionaire winning by a very small margin.
Trump won Michigan by 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by 23,000 and Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes.
Photograph: Matt Slocum / TT
Demonstrations against Trump.
Triumph over the fringe krymper
Thus, he was able to become president despite the fact that Hillary Clinton received almost three million more votes in total in the United States.
Now it seems that Trump’s happiness last time could be his misfortune.
Joe Biden has already won Wisconsin by roughly the same margin, Michigan by a slightly higher margin, and is slowly but surely consuming Trump’s leadership in Pennsylvania.
At most, Trump led there with more than 700,000 votes. As I write this, the margin has dropped to just over 100,000 and several hundred thousand mail votes remain to be counted. This in strong democratic areas where Biden is expected to get between 70 and 80 percent of the vote. Biden clearly has a chance to take home the state, even if it’s by no means obvious.
In other words, these are reverse roles compared to the 2016 election.
The states that made Trump president now appear to deny him reelection with the same extremely small margins.
As in 2016, the Democratic candidate wins by far the total number of votes. Biden leads with more than three million votes.
The state-by-state vote count
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