Few saw this knife-edge US election result coming. But we can’t say we weren’t warned. Overall, the 2020 election bears a striking resemblance to the one that took so many by surprise four years ago. The belief that 2020 would be decisively different from 2016 turns out to have been based on a very human but ultimately very foolish triumph of hope over experience. In politics, we have been reminded, hope is not power.
Four years ago, as now, the opinion polls pointed pretty consistently in one direction. Then, as now, the results did not reflect their confidence. That’s certainly the fault, in part, of the polls and their methodology. But the polls never want to get the result wrong. They have a vested interest – as do the media that commission them – in getting it right. The problem that the pollsters can’t lick is that they can’t reach everyone they need to.
That is what happened in 2016. Now it has happened again in 2020. This suggests that the Democrats were fighting the wrong campaign. Joe Biden and his voters campaigned as if the Covid-19 pandemic was the main issue. But the white working-class voters in the rust belt and upper-midwest states who delivered victory to Trump in 2016 have not changed. They elected Trump for all the very serious reasons that quickly became a consensus explanation: they felt ignored, their jobs and communities had gone, they thought others – including foreigners – were getting too good a deal, and they wanted someone to speak for them. And the Democrats seemed to have stopped doing that.
None of that has changed in 2020, or not as much of it as lots of the Democrats – and, yes, the media too – persuaded ourselves. Those visceral complaints about being left behind, left out, ignored and unfairly dismissed were still there, still deep and still defining. Trump spoke to those complaints in ways that Biden did not, although he was better at it in some ways than Hillary Clinton. Trump’s much-stronger-than-predicted showing in those states this time tells us that the determinative experience in this election was not Covid or the death of George Floyd. It was the economy and, behind that, the enduring trauma of the 2008 financial crash and its inequalities.
That’s not to say Covid was irrelevant. Trump’s reckless negligence in the face of the pandemic clearly helped Biden to do well, not least among voters who were going to vote for him anyway. But Trump turned Covid to advantage too. His brush with the virus in October fired him up for a strong performance in the final weeks of the campaign. In public health terms it was outrageously reckless and irresponsible. But politically it was outrageously brilliant, a performance that brought a kind of hope to millions that they can get back to life as normal and can defeat the virus. In retrospect, much of the media failed to see this, perhaps because we didn’t want to believe it.
It’s not to say that Floyd’s death was irrelevant either. If Biden makes it over the line, African American votes will have been crucial. But white Americans, who still make up the majority of the electorate, have again rallied in spectacular numbers behind Trump. Hispanic voters have been split, in spite of – or perhaps because of – Trump’s anti-immigrant hostility. This election has not overcome the historic race divide that makes America different in so many ways from Europe. It has deepened and preserved it.
Whatever the eventual outcome of the election, there is one thing it emphatically was not. It was not the watershed moment that most of the rest of the world, and half of America, craved. It was not the cathartic rejection of Trump that seemed tantalisingly possible in the summer. Instead it was another squeaker. It is already another toxic seedbed of future challenges, disputes, investigations, conspiracy claims and lies. It is also – and there’s a pattern in modern American elections here – the third time in 20 years in which the electoral college may end up handing the White House to the candidate who lost the popular vote.
I thought Biden fought a skilful campaign in many ways: relying on his experience and decency, playing the long game, keeping the focus on Trump, trying to build a majority coalition and keep it together. But it hasn’t delivered a decisive victory. The senate seems likely to remain in Republican control. There has been no big boost for the Democrats in the house or at state level. All the old criticisms about Biden’s age and his big-tent politics will now resurge. The socialist wing of the Democratic party will believe that a more radical candidate would have done better. They will be wrong, but that argument is set to smoulder for years to come and to shape the 2024 election, for which manoeuvring will now begin.
The reality of the election is that the United States has shown itself to be, yet again, a 50-50 nation. Half of Americans backed Trump. The other half didn’t. In this respect, American electoral politics bears some comparison with other countries, not least Britain. The choice for both countries is whether to deepen that divide or to try to heal it. The choice is between a government that acts as if the other half does not exist, or a government that recognises that the other half exists too. Here again, hope points in one direction but experience points in the other.
The meaning of that grim conclusion should not be fudged. The result of the November 2020 election is that America has not purged itself of what it did in 2016. It has not turned its back on Trump’s climate change denialism, not rejected Trump’s racism, not spurned his isolationism, not punished him for rushing to pack the supreme court, not held him to account for his corruption and behaviour. The plain truth is this. Americans did a very bad thing indeed in 2016 and, whatever happens when the dust finally settles, Americans have pretty much done it again in 2020.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist More
