Philippa Kaur

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    in World Politics

    What Will a Post-Trump America Look Like?

    Americans are still anxiously waiting to find out who will be the 46th president of the United States. But while the results of the 2020 race may still be murky, what this election has made clear is that whoever succeeds President Donald Trump — whether in 2021 or 2025 — will face an uphill battle of governing a post-Trump America.

    What will this look like in practice? One only needs to look as far as one of the United States’ closest allies in the hemisphere, Colombia, for a glimpse of the challenges that await Trump’s successor.

    360° Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

    READ MORE

    Colombian politics has its own Trump-like figure. His name is Alvaro Uribe Velez. Elected in 2002, Uribe governed for eight years as a tough conservative politician. His aggressive military campaigns against the country’s guerilla groups brought long-sought stability and security to much of the country and transformed him into a national hero for many Colombians. But his presidency was also marred by controversy. He has been accused of facilitating widespread human rights abuses, corruption and drug trafficking.

    Despite — or perhaps because of — this dual legacy, Uribe has remained a central figure in Colombian politics since leaving the presidential palace. He continues to serve as the leader of the country’s ruling political party, the Democratic Center, and sat as a senator until summer 2020 when he resigned pending the results of a criminal investigation against him.

    The influence Uribe continues to wield on the Colombian political scene should serve as a warning to whoever succeeds Trump in the Oval Office. In Colombia, Uribe’s willingness and ability to mobilize broad swaths of the population to support his interests has proved a challenge for governance by opposing politicians.

    Former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos experienced this firsthand in 2016 as he tried to sell the people a peace deal to end the country’s 60-year-long civil war with a guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC). As the most visible and vocal opponent of the deal, Uribe consistently belittled both Santos as a politician and the peace he negotiated with the FARC. “Peace yes, but not like this” became his rallying cry in public speeches, interviews and perhaps his — and Trump’s — favorite platform, Twitter. His vitriolic attacks played a part in Colombians’ surprise rejection of the peace deal in a national referendum, a humiliating defeat for Santos.

    Trump May Still Influence US Politics

    The small margins of this year’s US presidential election suggest that a Democratic successor to Trump will have to confront a former president with a similarly devoted following as the one Uribe has maintained in Colombia. Trump is unlikely to bow graciously out of politics. With a large base that continues to support him, he could still influence politics informally, by calling on his followers to engage in (possibly violent) protests.

    Embed from Getty Images

    The president’s continued popularity among Republican voters may also force the GOP to maintain its current far-right policy positions to retain voters in future elections. The election of a QAnon conspiracy theorist to the House of Representatives confirms that Trump’s influence reaches beyond the presidency.

    Indeed, Democrats are not the only ones who should be worried about Trump’s continued influence after leaving office. Uribe’s handpicked successor in the 2018 presidential election, President Ivan Duque, has struggled to govern under the shadow of the former leader. Like the US, Colombia today is deeply polarized. Though Duque and his allies hold a majority in the Senate, distrust and frustration with the government sent nearly 200,000 Colombians to the streets of the country’s major cities in protest last year.  

    But Duque’s reliance on support from Uribe’s hardline followers has effectively precluded him from building bridges with his opponents, lest he be seen as abandoning Uribe’s legacy. Unable to fully satisfy either camp, Duque’s approval rating has languished far below 50% for most of his presidency.

    Confronting the Legacy

    Republicans will face a similar challenge if they wish to maintain Trump’s base while also trying to repair the deep divisions that he has sown among US society.

    It may seem extreme to compare the United States to Colombia, a country that has teetered on the edge of collapse and conflict for over 60 years. But the reality is that the US is also a post-conflict country. Our civil war may have ended in 1865, but events in 2020 — the partisan reactions to the coronavirus pandemic, racial tensions following the extrajudicial killings of black Americans, and a presidential vote that remains too close to call three days after the election — have proved that the legacy of the violence and the polarization it sowed persist today.

    Whoever succeeds Donald Trump must confront this legacy head-on. But as Colombia shows, doing so with Trump in the background will be far from easy.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    in US Politics

    Ambiguity may offer short term political benefits, but in the long term is corrosive

    As the results of the US election began to arrive, political junkies tried their best to make sense of what was happening. But it soon became obvious that the only thing clear about the results was that they were ambiguous.
    Ambiguity is a strategic resource leaders use to accomplish their [goals]. When the US president, Donald Trump, appeared in the early hours of Wednesday morning, he told the small crowd “we were getting ready to win the election”, adding “frankly we did win this election”. A few hours earlier, Biden had appeared on stage and told his supporters “to keep the faith guys, we’re gonna win this”. Neither knew the outcome of the election. But they knew they had to make the most political capital out of the situation’s ambiguity.
    The lack of a clear, immediate outcome meant partisan supporters were temporarily off the hook from questioning their own inflexible mindsets. Trump supporters could focus on his victory in Florida and complain about supposed attempts by Democrats to “steal the election”. Biden supporters could focus on victories in the rust-belt states, and potentially even on eventual victory. As ever, these different interpretations were aided and abetted by the division along political lines of the US news media.
    We might expect politicians to exploit ambiguity, while still hoping that financial markets prefer precision and certainty. But some investors seem to be fine with ambiguity as well. There were few wild swings in the financial markets, with VIX – the so-called investor “fear index” of volatility – falling about 20% following the election results, and the two main American stock markets rose. One investment strategist told the Financial Times that he was glad of a return to the “status quo”, while another expressed his relief that there had been no major outbreaks of violence.
    The current situation may have helped politicians, partisans and investors in the short term, but such ambiguity could prove much more dangerous in the medium to longer term. Here, ambiguity can create a kind of cognitive cushion for leaders. It means they never have to update their assumptions, clinging to ideas that are increasingly out of touch with reality. A consequence is that leaders may commit to actions that are unwise, or downright dangerous. For a current example, Trump’s demand for all counting of votes to stop is a course of action that would, given that he is trailing, lose him the election.
    Compounding economic and political uncertainty
    Continued ambiguity can also be harmful for a politican’s followers. If partisan political tribes are faced with information that does not fit with their belief, they become disoriented and even angry. For example, those that believe their preferred candidate has won an election only to later discover that this is not the case, who might decide to explain this away with claims of victory being “stolen” from them. Believing they have had a justified outcome removed from them illegally, they may be more likely to rely on equally extra-institutional or illegal measures to express their displeasure and right what they perceive to be a wrong.
    Officials head into their third day of counting ballots in the US elections which will, eventually, put an end to the uncertainty. Erik S. Lesser/EPA
    Lasting ambiguity can also have a negative impact on the economy. In the 2000 US presidential election, which led to a month of uncertainty as to the winner, stock markets dropped significantly. Political uncertainty tends to hit some companies harder than others: firms closely connected to politicians are likely to see their share prices fall.
    This economic impact can be increased if political ambiguity leads rival supporters to settle their differences on the streets. One study in Egypt found that public protests lead to share price falls for firms connected to government figures. Continued political uncertainty can change the way firms behave. Firms are less likely to conduct initial public offerings during politically uncertain periods, for instance. Firms are also much less likely to invest in innovation.
    Uncertainty created by political ambiguity becomes a drag on economic growth . Conversely as political uncertainty declines, share prices tend to rise, banks become more willing to lend, businesses employ more people, and those employees are able to consume more.
    So an ambiguous electoral result might provide a space free of firm facts in which we can believe that reality matches our beliefs. But political ambiguity can bring with it dangerous consequences, fostering unrealistic beliefs, stoking conflict, and leading to economic stagnation.
    In the US, we know that one candidate will be eventually confirmed as president. But the danger is that the political ambiguity created by this election – and deliberately fostered in some quarters – will leave a long shadow. More

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    in US Politics

    Election ambiguity may be beneficial in the short term, but in the long term it's corrosive

    As the results of the US election began to arrive, political junkies tried their best to make sense of what was happening. But it soon became obvious that the only thing clear about the results was that they were ambiguous.
    Ambiguity is a strategic resource leaders use to accomplish their [goals]. When the US president, Donald Trump, appeared in the early hours of Wednesday morning, he told the small crowd “we were getting ready to win the election”, adding “frankly we did win this election”. A few hours earlier, Biden had appeared on stage and told his supporters “to keep the faith guys, we’re gonna win this”. Neither knew the outcome of the election. But they knew they had to make the most political capital out of the situation’s ambiguity.
    The lack of a clear, immediate outcome meant partisan supporters were temporarily off the hook from questioning their own inflexible mindsets. Trump supporters could focus on his victory in Florida and complain about supposed attempts by Democrats to “steal the election”. Biden supporters could focus on victories in the rust-belt states, and potentially even on eventual victory. As ever, these different interpretations were aided and abetted by the division along political lines of the US news media.
    We might expect politicians to exploit ambiguity, while still hoping that financial markets prefer precision and certainty. But some investors seem to be fine with ambiguity as well. There were few wild swings in the financial markets, with VIX – the so-called investor “fear index” of volatility – falling about 20% following the election results, and the two main American stock markets rose. One investment strategist told the Financial Times that he was glad of a return to the “status quo”, while another expressed his relief that there had been no major outbreaks of violence.
    The current situation may have helped politicians, partisans and investors in the short term, but such ambiguity could prove much more dangerous in the medium to longer term. Here, ambiguity can create a kind of cognitive cushion for leaders. It means they never have to update their assumptions, clinging to ideas that are increasingly out of touch with reality. A consequence is that leaders may commit to actions that are unwise, or downright dangerous. For a current example, Trump’s demand for all counting of votes to stop is a course of action that would, given that he is trailing, lose him the election.
    Compounding economic and political uncertainty
    Continued ambiguity can also be harmful for a politican’s followers. If partisan political tribes are faced with information that does not fit with their belief, they become disoriented and even angry. For example, those that believe their preferred candidate has won an election only to later discover that this is not the case, who might decide to explain this away with claims of victory being “stolen” from them. Believing they have had a justified outcome removed from them illegally, they may be more likely to rely on equally extra-institutional or illegal measures to express their displeasure and right what they perceive to be a wrong.
    Officials head into their third day of counting ballots in the US elections which will, eventually, put an end to the uncertainty. Erik S. Lesser/EPA
    Lasting ambiguity can also have a negative impact on the economy. In the 2000 US presidential election, which led to a month of uncertainty as to the winner, stock markets dropped significantly. Political uncertainty tends to hit some companies harder than others: firms closely connected to politicians are likely to see their share prices fall.
    This economic impact can be increased if political ambiguity leads rival supporters to settle their differences on the streets. One study in Egypt found that public protests lead to share price falls for firms connected to government figures. Continued political uncertainty can change the way firms behave. Firms are less likely to conduct initial public offerings during politically uncertain periods, for instance. Firms are also much less likely to invest in innovation.
    Uncertainty created by political ambiguity becomes a drag on economic growth . Conversely as political uncertainty declines, share prices tend to rise, banks become more willing to lend, businesses employ more people, and those employees are able to consume more.
    So an ambiguous electoral result might provide a space free of firm facts in which we can believe that reality matches our beliefs. But political ambiguity can bring with it dangerous consequences, fostering unrealistic beliefs, stoking conflict, and leading to economic stagnation.
    In the US, we know that one candidate will be eventually confirmed as president. But the danger is that the political ambiguity created by this election – and deliberately fostered in some quarters – will leave a long shadow. More

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    in World Politics

    The Real Scandal of Jeremy Corbyn’s Exclusion

    Earlier this year, an internal report from the UK’s Labour Party revealed that some of its influential members worked to sabotage former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral chances in 2017, the election in which he nearly achieved an unexpected victory against Prime Minister Theresa May. 

    Over the next two and half years, leading up to last December’s election, a group of diligent party members, echoed by much of the media, including The Guardian, collaborated on undermining Corbyn’s chances in the 2019 snap election called by Boris Johnson. They did so by focusing on the theme of anti-Semitism.

    How Do You Fix the Soul of the Nation?

    READ MORE

    After Labour’s defeat last December that confirmed Johnson as an elected prime minister and led to Corbyn’s resignation as the party leader, Labour’s establishment elected Keir Starmer to replace him, but apparently that wasn’t enough. As discreetly as possible, they continued relentlessly to shame Corbyn. Last week, exploiting the anti-Semitism theme thanks to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report, Labour took the extraordinary initiative of suspending Corbyn from the party in an act that Joseph Stalin’s politburo could only have admired.

    With a tone resembling a subdued cry of victory, The Guardian announced that “Labour has suspended its former leader Jeremy Corbyn after he said antisemitism in the party was ‘overstated’ following a damning report from the equality watchdog.” The article contained this somewhat surprising assertion: “A separate issue for Labour officials to work out is their precise legal culpability for online sentiments expressed by officials and others.”

    Here is today’s 3D definition:

    Online sentiments:

    Ideas, opinions or feelings expressed on the dangerous borderline between public and private discourse known as on social media, which means that random utterances in that medium can be targeted by groups specialized in shaming individuals who fail to agree with or conform to their own agendas.

    Contextual Note

    By suspending Corbyn, Labour has demonstrated that today’s technology has enabled Stalinist tactics far more sophisticated than Uncle Joe could have imagined. It provides them with the power to neutralize opponents without the bother of having to eliminate them physically.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Perhaps a better comparison to today’s public shaming would be to the Spanish Inquisition, immortalized in modern times by Michael Palin who famously cited its three weapons, “fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency,” before adding a fourth, “an almost fanatical devotion to the pope.” Labour’s equivalent to the pope is, of course, Tony Blair, the former prime minister. In terms of papal politics, Blair could best be compared to Benedict XVI as a quiet voice in the wings, who shouldn’t even be there, working discreetly to undermine his successor. 

    Starmer demonstrated his ruthless efficiency when, as The Guardian reports, he “spoke at a press conference where he said those who ‘deny there is a problem are part of the problem … Those who pretend it is exaggerated or factional are part of the problem.’” Like the Spanish Inquisition, the Labour Party has seized on a hint of criticism of the true faith (the EHRC report) that brooks no criticism but stands as infallible dogma. Suggesting that the report — which identified a total of two culprits in a party of 500,000 members — may have “overstated” the case or that there may be factions in the political church can only be deemed heresy.

    Whether the Labour Party subjected Corbyn to the rack or even the “comfy chair” remains unknown. What is clear is that after Corbyn’s claim that the case may have been overstated, the inquisitors noticed that the former leader had committed the ultimate sin: failing to “retract” his heretical statement. “In light of his comments made today and his failure to retract them subsequently, the Labour party has suspended Jeremy Corbyn pending investigation,” a Labour spokesman said.

    Historical Note

    In the guise of reporting political news, The Guardian, known as the respectable newspaper of the left, has played a major role in remodeling the Labour Party in the image of an anonymous group of improvised moralists who, through their mostly invisible lobbying, have demonstrated their sentimental attachment to the Tony Blair era and to everything Blair himself still represents.

    Labour has effectively assimilated the Stalinist tradition but given it a humanistic face. Dame Margaret Hodge, for example, offered this gentle version of excommunication: “Jeremy is a fully decent man, but he has an absolute blind spot, and a denial, when it comes to these issues. And that’s devastating.” If she believes he’s a decent man, she should object to his being accused of anti-Semitism. It’s all about perspective. If Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t see the same things as Hodge, who happens to be Jewish, it may be that he sees something else that Hodge may be blind to: the question of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

    Corbyn has not accused Hodge, Starmer or anyone else of being anti-Semitic, which he might do on the grounds that Palestinians are also Semites and are the target of not just hatred but physical oppression. Corbyn’s anti-Semitic crime is simply that his defense of one group of Semites calls into question the unconditional support every British citizen owes to another group of Semites, a nation considered an indefectible ally.

    This sums up the hypocrisy of the entire controversy. It turns around a denial of two dimensions of historical reality. None of Corbyn’s accusers, nor The Guardian itself, dares to mention the significance of events in the Middle East and the effect they can have on judgments and opinions that may or may not entail the evocation of stereotypes.

    The second obvious but unmentioned historical dimension concerns the recent history of the leadership of the Labour Party. It is also linked to events in the Middle East. Blair has been the most electorally successful Labour Party leader in recent times. He has also been its most egregious warmonger, responsible — along with former US President George W. Bush — for a vast and ongoing humanitarian disaster, extensively documented in the Chilcot report. Clearly, electoral success in politics counts more than probity or human rights, even though the worst perpetrators of human suffering, such as Blair, claim they are acting in the name of human rights.

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    The drama of Labour leadership reveals that the entire anti-Semitism campaign had a single purpose. It was designed not just to cripple the left but to definitively crush it. The Guardian quotes Peter Mason, the national secretary of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), who, before Corbyn’s suspension, made the intentions clear: “Jeremy Corbyn does not have a future in the Labour party, he is yesterday’s man.”

    In an interview with Chris Williamson, Aaron Maté, the American investigative journalist, explores the historical background of the issue. Williamson had earlier been suspended from Labour on the grounds of anti-Semitism but was fully exonerated by the EHRC inquiry. His detailed testimony, critical of Corbyn on political grounds, provides some much-needed context.

    The late and deeply regretted David Graeber — an influential American anthropologist who taught in the UK before his premature death in September — provided a thorough historical perspective on the anti-Semitism question in a video apparently no one at The Guardian seems aware of. Had they seen it, they might have used some of Graeber’s historical knowledge to nuance their judgment of Corbyn.

    For a declared and condemned anti-Semite, Corbyn had a surprising number of Jewish supporters ready to claim that he “has a proud record of fighting all forms of racism and antisemitism.” Will those Jewish supporters and the 60,000 members who signed the petition also be suspended? Will they be asked to retract?

    The Guardian’s role in promoting the controversy and shaming Corbyn has been as appalling as it has been successful. The only trace of someone offering pertinent historical perspective published in The Guardian is a letter to the editor they can easily dismiss as someone’s mere opinion. 

    The New York Times at least offered a dry appreciation of the meaningless of Corbyn’s suspension: “The party did not immediately make clear what rule Mr. Corbyn had breached, though analysts said it likely had to do with bringing the party into disrepute.” Labour didn’t need Corbyn to bring it into disrepute. Blair accomplished that with panache 17 years ago. Keir Starmer has jumped on Blair’s bandwagon.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    in US Politics

    US election: what the closeness of the results mean for Democrats and Republicans

    As vote counting continued in key battleground states in the US election, Joe Biden edged closer to the White House while Donald Trump launched multiple law suits. Whatever the final result, Democrats have not secured the resounding landslide against Republicans many of them had hoped for. Thomas Gift, associate professor and director of the Centre on US Politics at UCL, looked at what the close margin of the race means for both parties.
    Q: Whatever the final vote count, what does the closeness of the race mean to the dynamics within the Democratic Party and the authority of Biden’s leadership of it?
    When it comes to governing, mandates matter. Even if Biden ekes out a win, he will enter the White House knowing that nearly half of all American voters supported another candidate. That surely weakens Biden’s bargaining position with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Less appreciated, however, is that it could also reduce Biden’s strength within his own party.
    If there’s one take-away from the primary season, it’s that the Democratic Party is riven by major policy divisions between moderates and progressives. Although some of those divides were suppressed in the lead-up to election day, they haven’t disappeared.
    If Biden’s win is seen as less than decisive, progressive Democrats could try to exploit that result to undermine Biden’s efforts to govern from the centre. Biden says that he will stand up against the far left flank of his party. But pressure to make concessions may be greater than if he’d had won in a landslide.

    Q: What does the closeness of the race mean for Trump’s ongoing position within the Republican party?
    Even if Trump can’t pull out a win, the closeness of the election points to a clear take-away: support for Trump within the Republican Party remains strong. That makes it hard for critics to write off Trump’s success in 2016 as a fluke. It also means that, regardless of the Republican Party’s future, it’s likely to maintain some non-trivial “Trumpian” elements.
    Many conservative “never-Trumpers” hoped that a resounding Trump loss would force the party to rethink its current trajectory. That resounding loss didn’t happen. So, while it’s possible the Republican Party could snap back to its former self and ask “Trump who?” as soon the president leaves the Oval Office, that prospect looks less likely now.
    Trump’s appeal, and particularly his acumen for exciting the Republican base, can’t be ignored by Republicans – including many members of Congress who just got re-elected by running on pro-Trump platforms.
    Trump: not going away. Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA
    Q: Voter turnout has broken records in the 2020 election. But what does the popular vote margin for both candidates reveal about how divided America still is?
    America is divided. That much is clear. It’s not just divided on issues – about how to tackle climate change, what marginal tax rates should be, and what stance the government should take on US-China trade. It’s divided about the meaning of America itself.
    The record high turnout that we witnessed is likely to be evidence of both sides subscribing to the view of 2020 being the most consequential election of our lifetime. On the left, voters saw Trump not just as wrong about policies, but as an existential threat to the nation’s institutions. On the right, voters saw Biden not just as misguided on issues, but as emblematic of a drift toward socialism.
    One silver lining of 2020 is that it has alerted more Americans to the value of civic engagement. But it’s hard not to think that – at least on some level – record high turnout is symptomatic of many citizens simply sensing there’s something ailing American democracy.
    Read more: US election: why democratic legitimacy remains at stake
    Q: It’s looking likely that whoever is elected may not control both the House and the Senate. How difficult will it be for him to govern?
    Divided government always implies gridlock. Yet it doesn’t mean the gears of policymaking in Washington totally grind to a halt. Presidents are generally less constrained by Congress in foreign policy compared to domestic policy. If elected, for example, Biden could re-engage the US with the Paris Climate Agreement, rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, or roll back the trade war with China.
    Increasingly, presidents have also turned to executive orders to push through their agendas in the face of Congressional resistance. During his term, Trump signed a number of executive orders to enact reforms over homeland security, healthcare, the environment, and other issues.
    Although executive orders are more easily overturned, their effects can be significant. Biden, for example, has said that he would use an executive order to implement a national mask mandate amid COVID-19. More

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    in US Politics

    US election: what the tight results mean for Democrats and Republicans

    As vote counting continued in key battleground states in the US election, Joe Biden edged closer to the White House while Donald Trump launched multiple law suits. Whatever the final result, Democrats have not secured the resounding landslide against Republicans many of them had hoped for. Thomas Gift, associate professor and director of the Centre on US Politics at UCL, looked at what the close margin of the race means for both parties.
    Q: Whatever the final vote count, what does the closeness of the race mean to the dynamics within the Democratic Party and the authority of Biden’s leadership of it?
    When it comes to governing, mandates matter. Even if Biden ekes out a win, he will enter the White House knowing that nearly half of all American voters supported another candidate. That surely weakens Biden’s bargaining position with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Less appreciated, however, is that it could also reduce Biden’s strength within his own party.
    If there’s one take-away from the primary season, it’s that the Democratic Party is riven by major policy divisions between moderates and progressives. Although some of those divides were suppressed in the lead-up to election day, they haven’t disappeared.
    If Biden’s win is seen as less than decisive, progressive Democrats could try to exploit that result to undermine Biden’s efforts to govern from the centre. Biden says that he will stand up against the far left flank of his party. But pressure to make concessions may be greater than if he’d had won in a landslide.

    Q: What does the closeness of the race mean for Trump’s ongoing position within the Republican party?
    Even if Trump can’t pull out a win, the closeness of the election points to a clear take-away: support for Trump within the Republican Party remains strong. That makes it hard for critics to write off Trump’s success in 2016 as a fluke. It also means that, regardless of the Republican Party’s future, it’s likely to maintain some non-trivial “Trumpian” elements.
    Many conservative “never-Trumpers” hoped that a resounding Trump loss would force the party to rethink its current trajectory. That resounding loss didn’t happen. So, while it’s possible the Republican Party could snap back to its former self and ask “Trump who?” as soon the president leaves the Oval Office, that prospect looks less likely now.
    Trump’s appeal, and particularly his acumen for exciting the Republican base, can’t be ignored by Republicans – including many members of Congress who just got re-elected by running on pro-Trump platforms.
    Trump: not going away. Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA
    Q: Voter turnout has broken records in the 2020 election. But what does the popular vote margin for both candidates reveal about how divided America still is?
    America is divided. That much is clear. It’s not just divided on issues – about how to tackle climate change, what marginal tax rates should be, and what stance the government should take on US-China trade. It’s divided about the meaning of America itself.
    The record high turnout that we witnessed is likely to be evidence of both sides subscribing to the view of 2020 being the most consequential election of our lifetime. On the left, voters saw Trump not just as wrong about policies, but as an existential threat to the nation’s institutions. On the right, voters saw Biden not just as misguided on issues, but as emblematic of a drift toward socialism.
    One silver lining of 2020 is that it has alerted more Americans to the value of civic engagement. But it’s hard not to think that – at least on some level – record high turnout is symptomatic of many citizens simply sensing there’s something ailing American democracy.
    Read more: US election: why democratic legitimacy remains at stake
    Q: It’s looking likely that whoever is elected may not control both the House and the Senate. How difficult will it be for him to govern?
    Divided government always implies gridlock. Yet it doesn’t mean the gears of policymaking in Washington totally grind to a halt. Presidents are generally less constrained by Congress in foreign policy compared to domestic policy. If elected, for example, Biden could re-engage the US with the Paris Climate Agreement, rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, or roll back the trade war with China.
    Increasingly, presidents have also turned to executive orders to push through their agendas in the face of Congressional resistance. During his term, Trump signed a number of executive orders to enact reforms over homeland security, healthcare, the environment, and other issues.
    Although executive orders are more easily overturned, their effects can be significant. Biden, for example, has said that he would use an executive order to implement a national mask mandate amid COVID-19. More

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    in US Politics

    3 scholars explain Senate results in South Carolina, Iowa and Arizona – and what they say about voters

    The past few election cycles have seen notable geographical shifts in voting. Rural voters – already a bedrock of GOP support – have supported the party by wider margins. The 2018 midterms, meanwhile, showed the suburbs increasingly turning blue.
    Going into this year’s general election, political observers wanted to know: Would these trends persist in 2020? And how would they influence the battle for the Senate?
    Three scholars from three battleground states – South Carolina, Iowa and Arizona – weighed in on the 2020 results.
    Harrison coalition falls short
    Todd Shaw, University of South Carolina
    In a decisive victory, incumbent Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina won his race against Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison.
    Based on 96% of the reported vote, Graham netted 55% to Harrison’s 44%. This is nearly the exact same percentage of the South Carolina vote Donald Trump commanded over Joe Biden in the presidential race.
    Not only does this suggest there was little split-ticket voting down ballot, but Graham also outperformed many of the polls, which had indicated a much closer contest. At one point, the Cook Political Report had even deemed the race a toss-up.
    Harrison, who is African American, raised $57 million dollars in a final quarter prior to the election – setting an all-time quarterly record for a Senate race.
    And yet this mass infusion of funds wasn’t enough to unseat the three-term incumbent.
    South Carolina has long been a Republican stronghold. Democratic statewide candidates can usually rely on the vast majority of Black voters, who make up around 30% of the total electorate, and tend to try to pad that with some percentage of remaining votes. Rarely is this enough to put a Democratic statewide candidate over the top; they’ll usually get somewhere between 43% of the vote, with a ceiling of 47%.

    With 44%, Harrison was on the low side of that range.
    Why?
    Graham’s strategy, in which he took pains to demonstrate his loyalty to Trump and his agenda, clearly paid off. And as the chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, he recently presided over the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett as the sixth conservative justice on the Supreme Court. It’s possible his platform during the October hearings helped him rally the support of South Carolina’s conservative voters.
    Yet it seems as though Harrison ultimately failed to pad his base of Black support.
    According to exit polls, majorities of the non-Black constituencies who might typically have voted for Harrison in higher numbers – young people, middle-income earners, white college-educated women – reported voting for Trump over Biden.
    With strong Republican turnout and little split-ticket voting, this partly explains why Harrison – like so many Democrats across the nation – faced a much steeper uphill climb than the polls predicted.
    A ‘farm girl’ fails to woo Iowa’s rural vote
    Paul Lasley, Iowa State University
    In Iowa, there were rumblings that the unpopularity of some of Trump’s policies with farmers would drag down incumbent Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, a reliable ally of the president.
    Instead, Ernst maintained her strong support among evangelical Christians, who make up about 28% of Iowa’s population, and farm families. It was enough to fend off a challenge from Democratic businesswoman Theresa Greenfield. Trump also outperformed preelection polls and defeated Joe Biden in the state.
    Rural voters in Iowa make up 36% of the population. They’re a significant voting bloc and an important part of Iowa’s Republican base. Any Democratic candidate who wants to win needs to appeal to these voters.
    Greenfield showed signs of making inroads; during her campaign, she stressed her background as a “feisty farm girl” with deep roots in rural Iowa. She also was able to hammer the Trump administration’s tepid support for renewable fuels and its bashing of wind energy, two important industries in the state.
    Trump’s trade war was another issue. China’s retaliatory tariffs have cost Iowa farmers over US$500 million. Yet thanks to the ethanol fuel waivers granted to small refineries, farmers have largely remained loyal to Trump. And it certainly didn’t hurt that the Trump administration funneled millions of dollars into Iowa to shore up the state’s flagging farm economy.
    On social issues, rural Iowans are deeply conservative. Many are staunch pro-lifers, and Ernst has cultivated a strong alliance with the Family Leader, a socially conservative political organization, to help secure the votes of the state’s religious voters.
    [embedded content] Sen. Joni Ernst speaks at the 2019 Family Leadership Summit.
    Greenfield did make the race competitive. She enjoyed strong support among urban voters in cities such as Des Moines and Cedar Rapids and performed better than Ernst’s 2014 opponent, U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley.
    But, like Biden, she ultimately failed to cut into the incumbent’s traditional rural base.
    A battle for ‘soft’ Republican women in Arizona
    Gina Woodall, Arizona State University
    Two years ago, Republican Martha McSally lost to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in a close contest to replace retiring Sen. Jeff Flake. This was a big deal for Arizona Democrats: The last time a Democratic Senate candidate had won an open seat in the state was in 1976.
    After Republican Sen. John McCain died in August 2018, Gov. Doug Ducey appointed McSally to McCain’s seat. In the 2020 cycle, she found herself facing Democrat Mark Kelly, a former astronaut.
    McSally is now 0 for 2.
    Kelly proved a formidable opponent. Throughout the course of the campaign, he retained a lead in the vast majority of polls, while outraising McSally.
    In the last few weeks of the campaign, it appeared that both Kelly and McSally were jockeying for the suburban independent and “soft” – or persuadable – Republican female vote.
    This strategy played out in the campaigns’ dueling ads. McSally focused on Kelly’s role as a brand ambassador for the watch company Breitling, which has come under fire for using sexist ads. McSally also highlighted her biography as both a combat pilot and sexual assault survivor.
    Kelly, in his own ads, noted how his mother became the first female police officer of his town. He’s also focused on the women in his family – his two grown daughters and his wife, former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords.

    It seems as though McSally’s attempt to win over this bloc of soft Republican female voters fell flat.
    It’s certainly possible increased voter turnout among Democrats – together with a female suburban revolt against Trump – ultimately dragged down the sitting senator.
    And now traditionally “red” Arizona is set to have two Democrats simultaneously serving in the United States Senate – something that hasn’t happened since 1952.
    [Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get expert takes on today’s news, every day.] More

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    in World Politics

    Can America Restore Its Democracy?

    You know about the five-second rule. According to conventional wisdom, food that has dropped on the floor can be safely eaten if retrieved within five seconds. Some scientists have even set up experiments to confirm this folk saying. Of course, all bets are off if your toast falls on the floor buttered side down and you haven’t mopped the kitchen in recent memory.

    How Do You Fix the Soul of the Nation?

    READ MORE

    Today, after a contentious election and with the results of the presidential race still uncertain, we are all now looking down at the ground. It’s been four years since Donald Trump dropped the buttered toast of our democracy onto the floor. After four years face down in the dirt, can our democracy be picked up, dusted off and restored to some semblance of integrity?

    The 2020 Election

    The polls made it look like Joe Biden would be an easy winner, maybe even in a landslide. The Democrats were expected to retake the Senate. The huge number of early votes — nearly 100 million — suggested that the 2020 turnout would be the greatest in more than 100 years. The Democratic Party is supposed to benefit from more souls at the polls.

    The polls were off. If Joe Biden wins, he will do so by a slender margin and only after considerable legal wrangling by both parties. The Democrats are now a long shot to win control of the Senate. And the huge turnout has translated into Donald Trump getting more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, more in fact than any Republican candidate in history.

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    Texas did not go blue. Neither did Florida or Ohio. The Republican Party went all in for Trump, and he delivered beyond his base. But Arizona may have flipped, and Georgia might as well. If the infamous “Blue Wall” holds — at least Wisconsin and Michigan if not Pennsylvania — then Biden will become the next president.

    Still, who in their right mind would want to lead the United States at this perilous moment? The pandemic is surging. The economy hasn’t climbed out of its hole. Donald Trump has applied his scorched-earth approach to both foreign and domestic policy. The Republican Party has demonstrated that it delights in playing dirty, refuses to compromise for the national good and embraces the most malign of Trump’s many fictions from the uselessness of masks to the myth of climate change.

    Exit polls, meanwhile, reveal a country divided by more than just party affiliation. Democrats, for instance, overwhelmingly want to contain the current pandemic while Republicans want to focus on reopening the economy. This dynamic explains why so many Trump voters believe the president better handles both the economy and the pandemic, even if the evidence of his mismanagement is obvious to everyone else.

    Trump’s “law and order” message also proved influential among Republican voters, despite the president’s blatant violations of law and disruptions of order. Heck, according to a recent judicial ruling, even the president’s Commission on Law Enforcement broke the law!

    Perhaps the most sobering conclusion from the election is that nearly half the country is indifferent to the actual mechanisms of democracy. They just don’t care that their president refused to endorse a peaceful transition of power if he loses. They don’t care that he has derided the very act of voting by insisting, as he did early Wednesday morning, on enlisting the Supreme Court in an effort to stop the counting of the remaining ballots (except in those states, like Arizona, where he hopes to catch up). Nor do they see anything wrong with the Republican Party’s efforts to keep certain groups of people away from the polls.

    That doesn’t bode well for the future of American democracy, especially if the country continues to abide by the Electoral College. For the last several decades, US presidential elections have resembled Groundhog Day — and I don’t mean the movie. Why should one groundhog determine the length of winter? Don’t the other groundhogs get a vote? Likewise, why should a voter in Pennsylvania matter more than a voter in Maryland or Wyoming?

    Trump is not the only culprit here. The ground was dirty before he dropped our democracy on it. The Democrats and their patronage systems, like Tammany Hall in New York and Richard Daley’s machine in Chicago, set some dismal precedents. But now it is the Republican Party that, to preserve its governing majority in the absence of a popular mandate, is warping the rules of the game and breaking the few rules that remain.

    People vs. Putative Adults

    Let’s say that Biden ekes out a victory. What’s the damage report on Trump’s four-year assault on democracy? After the 2016 election, the pundit class asserted that one man, however powerful, could not tear down the 250-year-old edifice of American democracy. There was much talk of “guardrails” and “adults in the room,” all of which were supposed to contain the ungovernable id in the White House.

    Over the course of four years, however, Trump systematically disposed of the supposed adults in the room — Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly — in favor of yes-men and one or two yes-women. In addition, through executive orders, judicial appointments and obsessive Twittering, he moved the guardrails so that he could steer America wildly off the road.

    Just before the 2018 midterm elections, I wrote, “it would be poetic justice if what’s left of the mechanisms of democracy — voting, the courts, and the press — can still be used to defeat a potential autocrat, his family, and all the putative adults he’s brought into the room to implement his profoundly anti-democratic program.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Over the last two years, those mechanisms were in fact on full display. Despite Trump’s full-court press, the judiciary has represented an important check on his power, blocking some of his attacks on immigrants, his efforts to withhold his financial information and to throw out ballots. The mainstream media, meanwhile, continued to nip at Trump’s ankles. The New York Times, for example, published one expose after another about Trump’s record on the pandemic, his taxes, his financial relations with China and so on.

    And now the voters have had their say. Despite all the efforts by the Republican Party to suppress the vote, around 67% of eligible voters turned out this year, the highest percentage since 1900. Trump supporters did what they could to push against that tide. They intimidated voters. They disrupted Democratic Party events and even tried to run a Biden bus off the road in Texas. They restricted the number of ballot drop-off locations. The post office, run by a Trump appointee, ignored a court order to locate 300,000 mail-in ballots at risk of not being delivered. But voters gonna vote.

    Let’s also salute all the people who have made that vote possible. Despite the pandemic, tens of thousands of people showed up to staff polling sites and count ballots. Then there are all the volunteers who participated in get-out-the-vote campaigns by knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending texts and doing grassroots fundraising to keep the operations going. Democracy, in other words, is not just about the politicians and the voters. It requires an immense effort by a veritable army of people. They, not the candidates, are the winners of the 2020 election.

    Democracy’s Future

    Trump is not done. Even if he doesn’t get his presumed entitlement of four more years, he has two more months to trash his frat house of a presidency before turning it over to the next administration. That means more executive orders like the recent ones that opened up Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and removed workplace protections from federal civil servants. If Biden manages to take his place in the Oval Office, he’ll likely face a Republican-controlled Senate that will block his every move, just like Republicans adopted a no-compromise position after the election of Barack Obama.

    Certainly, Biden aims to reverse many of Trump’s executive orders with his own ones. That will work in the foreign policy realm, for instance recommitting the United States to the Paris climate accords. But any domestic orders will face court challenges, and suddenly the Republican Party’s strategy of pushing through an unprecedented number of federal judges takes on an even more ominous cast. Popular will be damned. The Republicans will rely on senators, lawyers and judges to institutionalize Trump’s legacy.

    Unlike 2008, the Democrats will be hard-pressed this time to claim an overwhelming popular mandate after such a close election. Trump voters, meanwhile, are not going away. They’ll continue showing up with guns. They’ll refuse to wear masks. They’ll spread fake news and outlandish conspiracy theories.

    They’ll also challenge the federal government — now led by an adversary, not an ally — at every turn. Remember the 2016 standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, when a bunch of right-wing extremists seized government property and faced off against law enforcement? Expect an uptick in outright confrontations between federalists and anti-federalists during Biden’s presidency.

    Let’s face it: The democracy that Donald Trump dropped on the floor suffered a great deal from the experience. It’s going to take more than an election to put it right.

    *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More