A dizzying, whipsaw night keeps America, and the world beyond, transfixed
The world is holding its breath. Inside the United States and far beyond it, people are waiting for an electoral verdict that will not only count as the most momentous in recent American history, but will affect the entire planet for years to come.
Election night brought no resolution, let alone catharsis. Instead, it involved long, anxious hours as even those with no vote and living many thousands of miles away messaged friends about early voting patterns in Florida or the volume of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. This felt like one election where the entire human race had skin in the game.
For it was not just Americans who sat transfixed as key states seemed to head one way and then the other, apparently popping in and out of the Joe Biden or Donald Trump column. Analysts had warned there might be a “blue mirage” in the south-eastern states of Florida or North Carolina and a “red mirage” in the Midwest – and the night seemed, however haphazardly, to follow that script. Early hope of Biden success in the south-east rapidly evaporated as the votes were counted, even as Trump appeared to pull ahead in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“Appeared” being the operative word. Despite Donald Trump’s 2am White House news conference – where he falsely claimed to have “already won the election” – the votes in those states were incomplete, with early or mail-in ballots not yet counted. Indeed, this was what made for such a dizzying, whipsawing night: early votes, in-person votes and postal votes were tallied at different rates and at different times in different places. Hence the mirage effect of a lead appearing, only to disappear.
A couple of things, at least, were clear. First, the Democratic candidate was set to beat the Republican in the overall popular vote, as has happened in every US presidential election bar one in the 21st century. Second, Joe Biden had failed to win the electoral college landslide of Democratic fantasies: no wins for him in Florida or Texas (although the AP did declare him the winner in Arizona and a narrow win still looked possible in a photo finish in Georgia).
In truth, that was what many people around the world had been hoping for, an unambiguous repudiation of Trump and Trumpism. If you think US polls showed Biden with a consistent lead over Trump – the final average put it at around eight points – among the global population it wasn’t even close. An Ipsos survey of 24 countries last month showed the Democrat leading Trump by a whopping average of 31 points, 48% to 17%. Among Britons the gap was even wider, Biden beating Trump 59% to 14%.
And yet, those outsiders were powerless, reduced to watching as Americans made their long, tortuous, often baffling way towards a choice. Some stayed up all night, others got up early to watch the results. Many just wanted to look away, still haunted by the trauma of 2016, when Trump defied expectations – and a 3m shortfall in the popular vote – to put together just the right pieces of the electoral college and win the presidency.
A similar feeling existed among the millions who populate blue-state America too, many of whom had felt throughout these last four years as if they too lived in another country. The American Psychological Association recently found that 68% of US adults saw this year’s presidential election as a “significant source of stress” in their lives – a figure that rose to 76% among Democrats. Many of them confessed on social media that, ideally, they would spend the 24 hours of election day unconscious, only waking up when it was all over.
The source of this angst was hardly mysterious. It has a name: Donald J Trump. His defenders call it Trump Derangement Syndrome, their term for the feverish hysteria, as they see it, that the incumbent president stirs in his opponents. And yet, for those who could not wait to cast their votes against Trump – and, for many, it was always more about rejecting Trump than electing Biden – there was nothing hysterical about it. They believed, in the words of journalist David Corn, that while Trump and Biden were the names on the ballot, it was the nation’s character that was “on the line”.
In this view, the re-election of Donald Trump would represent an endorsement of every awful thing he had said and done, whether that be the caging of migrant children or the praising of neo-Nazis and white supremacists as “very fine people”, the callous disregard for both science and human life that had seen 230,000 Americans die of Covid or the mass rallies where he encouraged the crowd’s fascistic demand that Trump’s political opponents be locked up.
What’s more, re-election would constitute not only retrospective approval for what Trump had done but a prospective mandate for what he would do next. Given the way he had trampled on democratic norms in his first term – and did so again with that premature claim of victory – many Americans dreaded to think what a Trump emboldened by re-election would do in his second.
Students of authoritarian regimes warned that he would stack the entire federal bureaucracy with cronies hired for loyalty rather than skill. His attacks on the press – which he’d already denounced as “the enemy of the people” – would surely escalate. The rule of law would no longer constrain him, not when he had appointed so many judges, who he apparently believed were duty bound to serve him rather than the country: at the White House, he said he would ask the supreme court to stop the counting of votes.
As for the corruption of his office, typified by his attempt to hold back military assistance to Ukraine unless that country agreed to dig up dirt on Biden – the high crime for which he was impeached – that would surely become unbound. No president had ever before won re-election after impeachment. Trump would surely regard such an accomplishment as a green light to do whatever the hell he liked.
Those outside the US dreaded a second Trump term for their own reasons. Trump had already shown his contempt for the idea of global alliances and cooperation, preferring to put “America first”. He had pulled the US out of the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal. How much more havoc would he wreak on the international system? Would he lose patience with America’s European allies, for example, and set about the destruction of Nato?
More deeply, they worried that a victorious Trump would hearten the forces of reactionary populism – from Viktor Orbán to Jair Bolsonaro via Vladimir Putin. It would make the 2020s the age of the strongman and the nationalist. America is still the world’s dominant cultural power. If Americans re-elected Trump, it would make populism the world’s dominant movement.
These were the anxieties felt across the globe and by many millions of Americans as the hours ticked by. Obviously they feared an outright Trump win, but they also feared precisely the scenario now playing out: an unclear outcome in which Trump would claim victory and set about pitting Americans against each other, on the streets and in the courts, a battle that could become long and – given America’s history – bloody.
And yet there was nothing to be done but wait for the votes to be counted, knowing that, not for the first time, the whole world was watching.
Source: The Guardian
