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      in US Politics

      A dysfunctional America helps China – but hurts Australia and our region | Natasha Kassam

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      As the US presidential election rolls into its fourth day of counting, Chinese leaders are not necessarily joining much of the world in frantically hitting refresh for updated vote tallies.
      As America edges towards a Biden victory in painful slow motion, there is no sense of urgency in Beijing, which benefits from the prolonged uncertainty.
      Chinese leaders – and many of its citizens – believe the United States is in terminal decline and that President Donald Trump has hastened the inevitable. The troubling story of decay in America paints a different picture in China from that in the rest of the world: the authoritarian model of politics and economics is just as good, if not better, than the liberal democratic model of the “west”.
      The coronavirus pandemic had already started the toppling dominos. China recovered from its disastrous response, wielding state capacity like an authoritarian sword to contain Covid-19. By contrast, the US has surrendered to the pandemic, tragically with a death toll 60 times that of China. The successes of democratic smaller nations, from Australia to Taiwan, barely register in Beijing.
      The four-day election count (so far) and divided polity are seen as further evidence of the wounds in US democracy. So too the increasingly erratic claims made by Trump that undermine US democratic institutions. These are chalked up as wins in Beijing’s column.
      More wins, from a Chinese perspective, are coming, and many in Australia’s immediate region. Beijing has threatened over $5bn exports from Australia. The issue has gained less traction than usual as eyes are glued to the circus that US politics has paraded for four years.
      China has also been extending olive branches across south-east Asia, providing technical assistance and protective equipment in the pandemic and attempting to repair the reputational hit that Covid-19 caused. Many have made deals with China guaranteeing preferential access if a Chinese vaccine candidate is approved.
      This vacuum was left by the US. When it comes to global public health, America has literally left the building. Ensnared in its own pandemic crisis, the world’s largest economy abandoned the World Health Organization. US allies are among the countries that China has promised priority access to vaccines, including the Philippines and Thailand.
      With the US missing in action, Australia has had to go it alone. Canberra has looked to counter China’s efforts, promising more than $500m in “vaccine diplomacy” across the region.
      China may struggle to find these opportunities if Biden is inaugurated. A globalist at heart, he has promised to reposition the US on the international stage and re-join the WHO. Australia should embrace that prospect.
      But for Beijing, the outcome of the US presidential election changes few of its policy settings. The Trump administration’s tough stance towards China is a rare glimpse of unity in a divided country.
      A potential Biden administration would continue to challenge China in most fields, including trade and technology. And any instinct by a potential president Biden to nominate Obama-era officials would need to get past the inevitable China-hawk test if the Republican-majority Senate remains.
      Tough China policy is also good politics in the US – as it is in Australia. Both Australian and American publics have soured on China as more evidence of China’s aggression and human rights abuses have come to light.
      One difference may be that a Biden administration would be better coordinated with partners and allies on China policy. Under Trump, US policy oscillated from praising Xi Jinping to attempting regime change. A stable and consultative approach would be music to Australia’s proverbial ears, as it faces the brunt of China’s economic coercion with little backup or support. Biden could also be convinced to revive the ailing World Trade Organization, though US concerns pre-dated Trump.
      Still, who wins the US election matters much more to Australia than China.
      A weaker United States, led by a president elected in a messy and marginal victory, would only make China more confident. And a new administration, distracted by domestic turmoil, may lack the bandwidth to wake up to the urgent support needed in Australia, and the broader region. A divided America may translate into an isolated Australia. And this, in turn, would embolden China.
      • Natasha Kassam is a research fellow at the Lowy Institute More

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      in World Politics

      What Will a Post-Trump America Look Like?

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      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

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      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 Elections

      Joe Biden urges calm: 'In America, the vote is sacred' – video

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      Joe Biden issued a very short statement on the current state of play in the presidential race, emphasizing that election officials must count every valid vote that was cast. Biden noted he and his running mate, Kamala Harris, ‘continue to feel very good’ about the ultimate result.
      Speaking at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, the Democratic nominee also noted the country was nearing 240,000 deaths from Covid-19 and expressed sympathy for Americans who had lost loved ones to the virus
      ‘Count every vote’: protesters take to streets across US
      Trump v Biden – full results as they come in More

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      in US Politics

      US voter demographics: election 2020 ended up looking a lot like 2016

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      More than 150 million American voters turned out for Tuesday’s election, marking the highest turnout in over a century. But as the country – and the world – await a complete result, what do we know about who voted for each of the candidates?
      While knowledge at this stage is limited – polling data can be unreliable and national exit polls do not take into account geographic differences within demographics – experts say that some broader trends among those who voted for Joe Biden and Donald Trump are apparent.
      So far, the picture appears to be strikingly similar to what it was in 2016, said the political science professor Charles H Stewart, founding director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab.“There were slight changes, but the changes in the electorate, at least the ones who showed up to vote on election day, are much less dramatic than we were being led to believe by the pre-election polls,” Stewart said.
      Pollsters had predicted this election would see the widest gender gap since women won the vote 100 years ago, but that does not appear to have transpired.
      Stewart noticed a slight widening of the gender gap – with women voting 56-43 for Biden, while the two candidates were almost tied among men.
      But one of the biggest divides that did come to pass was between older voters and those aged under 30, who became even “less enamoured of President Trump than before”.
      “The other age groups, 30-44, 45-64, 65 and over, it’s a pretty close divide between Biden and Trump. So it’s really young people who are overwhelmingly anti-Trump and that’s really noticeable.”
      He said Trump also lost some appeal among low-income voters, who were more attracted to Biden, but the president gained among voters with family incomes over $100,000 a year.
      “That right now appears to be the biggest demographic shift I’m seeing. And you can tie that to [Trump’s] tax cuts [for the wealthy] and lower regulations.”
      He added: “For as much as we talk about the culture wars and all of those sorts of things, it looks like the big thing was good old-fashioned pocketbook economics.”
      While evidence is lacking in exactly who voted, he said the increase in turnout probably came from young people and the Latino community, who he said “historically have been significantly underrepresented in the electorate.”
      Tens of millions of dollars were spent by Democratic and Republican campaign groups over the past couple of years to register voters and help increase turnout, especially among Latino communities. Grassroots Latino activism in states such as Arizona and Georgia, which are historically Republican, appear to have boosted Biden significantly.
      Contrary to what some polls predicted, Stewart said, exit polls do not show a “dramatic exodus from Trump” among older people. While in 2016, they showed 52% of voters aged 65 and older voted for Trump, in 2020 he said that figure was 51%.
      In terms of race breakdowns, Louis DeSipio, political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, said nationally Trump was estimated to have won about 57% of white votes – with huge state-to-state variations linked to factors such as education and age – and that African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans voted strongly for Biden.
      The most dramatic shift, he said, was probably in south Florida, where Trump is understood to have gained support among Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans who he said were “moving back into the Republican camp”.
      He added: “They had been steadily moving towards the Democrats really since 1996 or so, so that’s an interesting story and will need some attention.”
      An area where he believes Trump did not do so well among white voters is Arizona, where the Associated Press (AP) has called a Biden win.
      But he said Trump continued to have support among evangelical Christians and he was interested to see how Trump did among members of the military and veterans, when data emerges.
      Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (Circle) at Tufts University, said the more education young people had, the stronger preference they had for Biden.
      Using data from AP VoteCast, based on interviews with more than 110,000 likely voters, she said: “If they were 18-29 but were college graduates or post graduate studies, they were preferring Biden by more than two to one.”
      “Really in the youth electorate, the only groups that we know that preferred Donald Trump nationally is really white male.”
      Among young voters, the data showed that the group that preferred Trump most were either rural or lived in small towns and had not been to college, with 46% supporting Biden, versus 51% Trump. But, Kawashima-Ginsberg said, “every other group at least had an edge towards Joe Biden. Even the small-town rural college graduates preferred Biden by eight points, 52% to 44%.”
      The other biggest difference among youth voters, she said, was among white people and people of colour. Among white youth, she said there was a 19-point split by gender.
      Among first-time voters specifically, she said those aged up to 29 preferred Biden, with 53% supporting the Democrat, compared with 43% for Trump. But first-time voters aged 30-44 overwhelmingly supported Trump, who got 67% of their vote.
      But, she said, attempts to define demographic groups among voters can be vulnerable to generalisations and historical assumptions – particularly for people of colour.
      “We use political science models that are quite old to try to figure out who the voters are. But with diverse populations that are really rich in both heritages and what their belief systems are, it’s really hard to use well as a predictive model, and exit polls are always subject to that.” More

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      in US Politics

      'Republicans built the base': how Joe Biden lost Florida's Latino voters

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      [embedded content]
      As the coronavirus raged across Florida this summer, and the Democratic party was concentrating on locking in the support of the state’s hordes of senior voters, Donald Trump’s campaign was focused in an entirely different direction.
      In the streets of Miami’s Little Havana and Doral neighborhoods, the Puerto Rican communities of Orlando and Kissimmee, and Cuban-American areas of Tampa, activists from Latinos for Trump and other Republican groups were knocking on doors and talking to families and business owners. They delivered a simple message: “Joe Biden is a radical socialist. Donald Trump is your friend.”
      And for some of Miami’s Cubans and Venezuelans in particular, familiar with communism and authoritarian rule in their homelands, despite “red baiting” not being a new tactic, it was “kryptonite”, Trump activists claimed.
      Whatever their motivations, on Tuesday, across the state but mostly in Miami-Dade county, home to 2 million Latinos, voters turned out in droves to hand the president victory by a margin significantly larger than his 2016 success. More

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      in US Politics

      'What a spectacle!': US adversaries revel in post-election chaos

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      Rivals and enemies of the United States have come together to revel in the messiest US election in a generation, mocking the delay in vote processing and Donald Trump’s claims of electoral fraud in barely veiled criticisms of Washington’s political activism abroad.“What a spectacle!” crowed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “One says this is the most fraudulent election in US history. Who says that? The president who is currently in office.”With a large dose of schadenfreude, Washington’s fiercest critics declared deep concern about the US elections and the state of the country’s democracy.Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman on Thursday panned the “obvious shortcomings of the American electoral system”, calling the framework “archaic”.“It’s a show, you can’t call it anything but that,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s Duma, said earlier this week. “They say it should be seen as a standard for democracy. I don’t think it’s the standard.”In China, state media savaged the delayed results, with one daily writing that the process looked a “bit like a developing country”.Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, could not resist baiting the US over what he called its “surprising electoral process”, and seemed so amused that at one point he broke into song with a rendition of the theme tune to the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant: “On a night as beautiful as this, either of them could win,” he crooned, before adding with a chuckle: “The United States. I don’t stick my nose in.” In two recent local elections, he noted, all the votes had been counted by 11pm.As a parliamentary campaign kicked off in Venezuela this week, Maduro claimed there were important lessons the US could learn from its elections rather than lecturing the world about democracy. Venezuela was a showcase of “civilised and peaceful” voting using “proven and transparent technology” and biometric voting machines that provided same day results, he said.Trump has spent the last two years unsuccessfully trying to topple the Venezuelan president and in a Wednesday night broadcast Maduro delighted in the electoral confusion gripping his northern neighbour.“The state department puts out statements that say: ‘In this country we don’t recognise the election. In that country we don’t like the election. In the other country we don’t like this or that,’” Maduro said, adding that the US would be better off focusing on its own problems.As Trump demanded states stop counting mail-in ballots, the US embassy in Abidjan issued a poorly timed statement urging Côte d’Ivoire’s leaders to “show commitment to the democratic process and the rule of law”. “We also need a Côte d’Ivoire statement on US elections,” quipped one BBC editor on Twitter.For many, it was a chance to give the US a taste of its own medicine. “Neither free nor fair,” wrote Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russian state-backed RT, parroting the language of a UN or Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) statement.And the OSCE itself did weigh in, with mission leader Michael Georg Link attacking Trump for making “baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies” and “[harming] public trust in democratic institutions”.The irony was not lost on many at home. A cartoon by the Russian critic Sergei Elkin made the rounds on Thursday, featuring an elderly babushka lugging buckets of water past a man in a rundown village somewhere in Russia. “They still haven’t finished counting in Pennsylvania and in Michigan,” the man says. A stray dog walks along an unpaved street behind him. More

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      in Elections

      ‘Stop the vote’ and ‘count the votes’, say protesting Trump supporters – video

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      Count the votes or stop the count? Two conflicting Republican protests have emerged across the US, with some Trump voters demanding that election officials stop counting ballots in states such as Pennsylvania, where Trump holds a narrow lead, and previously Michigan, where Biden was out in front, but keep counting them in Arizona, where the current president is behind. So far, Trump has helped fuel both sides of the protests, filing lawsuits in some states to stop the vote count, and lawsuits in others that cast doubt on whether all votes have been properly counted
      US election live – follow all the latest updates
      Trump v Biden – full results so far More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Trump’s tactics: calculated brazenness | Editorial

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      Rarely have a few thousand votes in a handful of places mattered so much to so many. America – and the world – spent much of Thursday hanging once again on every twist of the long vote-counting battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the remaining battlegrounds. When it finally comes, the verdict will nevertheless be decisive. One of these two utterly different political leaders will become the United States president until 2025. History will be shaped by both the result and the aftermath.
      This election has highlighted deep weaknesses in the American democratic system, all of which are amplified by Mr Trump’s determination to test things to destruction in real time. Fortunately, the armed intimidation of voters and election officials by militias supporting Mr Trump did not happen on any scale. But other outrages did. The most egregious of these remains the scandal of systemic voter suppression by Republicans against minority ethnic voters across most of the US. This scandal has now been joined by Mr Trump’s brazen readiness to use his lawyers, often on the basis of lies, to try to stop the counting of votes.
      Underlying this is the electoral college system itself, which may yet deny the presidency – for what would be the third time in 20 years – to the candidate for whom most Americans voted. This anachronism may have been what America’s 18th-century white founders intended, when they tried to empower the states against the popular majority. But in an era of equal rights, it is an extraordinary hangover. The electoral college is not a check or a balance. It is an abuse that is ripe for the scrapheap.
      In most respects, the 2020 US election has proved less of a watershed. In the American system, voting at state level is often almost as important as the presidential contest. State elections, which choose members of the US Congress as well as of state legislatures, shape much of what a president can do at home. They provide a homeland context for the president’s actions on the world stage too. They define how far the presidential writ will run. Here the verdict this week was almost the opposite of decisive. In some ways it seems like a vote in favour of gridlock.
      Tuesday confirmed America is a country divided down the middle. These divides are at their most glaring in the Trump-Biden battle. This week, though, voters clearly drew back from handing all the power to one side of the divide. Republicans seem likely to keep control of the Senate, despite some losses. Similarly, Democrats survived setbacks to keep their grip in the House of Representatives. Many on both sides will interpret this as a mandate to fight every issue every inch of the way, with no concessions. A minority may see it as an ultimatum from the voters for the two sides to compromise and cut deals. This seems deeply unlikely.
      The calculated shamelessness of Mr Trump’s disregard for facts and propriety in his response to the election suggests the coming days and weeks will also be vicious, bitter and explosive. Even if Mr Biden eventually enters the White House as president in January, he will be immediately confronted with entrenched opposition. There is a newly strengthened conservative majority on the supreme court. Now there will also be a Senate that will claim a mandate to obstruct. Meanwhile, after a strong performance at state level, this week’s results ensure that Republicans will have the upper hand in the always dirty business of redrawing the states’ electoral maps for the coming decade. More