The race before the US presidential election has reached the finish line – there are exactly two months left before the vote on November 3, during which the most acute struggle usually unfolds. Guessing the winner of the American election is a popular game. Here, some people focus on the results of opinion polls, others-on the image of candidates in the press, others compare the budgets of election headquarters, and others invent their own signs.
A recent poll showed that trump supporters want to vote for him, while Democrats are driven not by sympathy for Biden, but by dislike for the head of the White house. Photo: Reuters a Recent poll showed that trump supporters want to vote for him, while Democrats are driven not by sympathy for Biden, but by dislike for the head of the White house. Photo: Reuters a Recent poll showed that trump supporters want to vote for him, while Democrats are driven not by sympathy for Biden, but by dislike for the head of the White house. Photo: Reuters
In almost all of them, the current President, Donald trump, as four years ago, is in the role of catch-up. For example, the popular predictive resource Five Thirty Eight estimates his chances of winning at 29 percent, while the probability of winning the us Democratic party candidate Joseph Biden is 71 percent. Opinion polls point in a similar direction. According to the aggregator Real Clear Politics, in national surveys, Biden is ahead of trump by an average of 7 percent. However, in the context of an indirect electoral system in the United States, national polls are not informative.
If you count the money, Biden’s staff raised a record $ 300 million in August. There is nothing to say about the press, most of it is waging a real war with trump.This time, even the historian Alan Lichtman – one of the very few who predicted a trump victory in 2016-turned away from the current President. Now Lichtman, on the basis of his own system, guessed all the results of the US presidential election without exception since 1984, predicts a Biden victory.
But American elections are notoriously unpredictable. First, the situation is not so obvious now that we consider the outcome of the elections a foregone conclusion. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that about 13 percent of voters are still undecided, which is more than enough to turn the situation on its head. Second, trump was in exactly the same, if not worse, position four years ago: opinion polls and experts vied with each other to predict his defeat, all the leading media outlets issued editorials urging him not to vote for him, and the campaign fees and campaign network of his rival Hillary Clinton exceeded his resources by orders of magnitude. The result is known.
If in the middle of the summer, amid the peak of coronavirus and rampant racial protests, Biden looked the undisputed favorite, now Trump has managed to reverse the downward trend. This is partly attributed to the effect of the recent Republican party election Convention. But it may also be evidence of more disturbing trends for Democrats. Rumor has it that there are fears in their ranks that the ongoing chaos on the streets is starting to play against them, support for the “black Lives matter” movement is on the decline, and trump’s slogans for bringing order with a firm hand are finding more understanding.
By and large, much is in the hands of trump, not his competitor. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll is very characteristic in this sense. More than 58 percent of Americans supporting Biden said: they will vote for the former Vice President not out of sympathy for him, but only because they want to cast votes against trump. At the same time, more than three – quarters of the current President’s supporters support him personally, and they do not care who his competitor is. In other words, trump supporters are much more enthusiastic about the candidate they are voting for than Biden supporters, who are much more driven by antipathy to the current head of the White house. Trump’s staff expects that this will guarantee a higher turnout of his supporters at polling stations.
The strategy of Biden’s staff seems to come down to a formula: no one can handle trump better than he can. The country is plunged into a coronavirus and the resulting economic crisis, split by racial contradictions. Trump as President remains in the spotlight, forced to defend and justify himself for all this, and, as the Democrats expect, here he should be destroyed by an expressive temperament. 77-year-old Biden with his senile reservations is able to harm himself as well as trump, and therefore he is deliberately kept in the shadows.
But the relative summer lull is over, and the focus on Biden will be more intense in the next couple of months. And if Trump is not used to being “in the crosshairs”, then how his competitor will cope with this is not yet clear.
Trump’s fight with Hillary Clinton in 2016 was widely called one of the most “dirty” in modern US history, and there is no reason to believe that the next two months will be different. Trump has been “watered” in recent years, but there is no doubt that Republicans will not remain in debt, stirring up Biden’s political underwear, including the Ukrainian stories of his son hunter. Trump himself is as inventive as ever about insulting an opponent who recently offered to pass a doping test.
Although the “field” stage of the election campaign, consisting of constant travel around the States and communicating with supporters, will be radically reduced this year due to the pandemic, there are several rounds of debates ahead, which will be watched by the whole country on TV. They do not always have a decisive influence on the course of the race, but sometimes this happens. Take the democratic primaries, in which Michael Bloomberg was listed as the favorite, but his failure at the debate largely predetermined the flight of voters to Biden.
Unexpected surprises cannot be excluded. Such as in 2016, the decision of then-FBI Director James Comey first two weeks before the election to resume the investigation of the “mail case” against Clinton,and two days before the election to close it. This is believed to have triggered a strong turnout of trump supporters.
Finally, a fair amount of turmoil may be caused by mail-in voting this year. This practice has always been common in the United States, but this year, due to the pandemic, the number of ballots cast in this way may break all records. Therefore, the issue of organization has become the subject of acute political battles. Democrats, whose candidate does not arouse public enthusiasm, are trying to increase the turnout of supporters by offering to send out ballots to all eligible voters in the face of a pandemic, not just to those who submit their own applications. Before trump, the task is exactly the opposite, and therefore he resists by hook or by crook, predicting mass fraud in the case of voting by mail.
So far, most forecasts predict a victory for Biden, but trump has repeatedly confirmed his political survival and is ready to fight to the end
At the same time, according to research, many more Democrats plan to vote by mail than Republicans. It will take weeks to process remotely submitted votes, and therefore, as writes axios.com it is possible that according to the results that will be on election day, trump may look like the winner, because the majority of Republicans plan to vote at polling stations. If, however, a few days or weeks after the mail-in votes are processed, the scales swing in favor of his opponent, it is difficult to imagine what kind of political storm might erupt. Do not forget that trump refused to recognize any outcome of the election in advance.
What does the rest of the world, including Russia, care about all this? US foreign policy is always derived from domestic policy, but this becomes especially clear during electoral periods. Foreign policy cuisine freezes in anticipation, and the decisions that are made are subordinated exclusively to electoral interests. No matter who won this battle, most experts do not expect major changes for the better. There is too little concrete content left in bilateral relations, and too strong an anti-Russian Foundation is laid in the United States at the level of laws written in recent years in the Wake of incessant attacks on Moscow.
