Some cheer for the 4th

It’s hard to work up the usual patriotic optimism this year. The United States faces a quadruple whammy: a re-surging Covid-19 epidemic, the major economic slowdown it has caused, a popular rebellion against police violence and racism, and revelations that President Trump failed to respond to Moscow’s payment of bounties to Taliban who kill Americans in Afghanistan. The President is trying to distract attention from all four, but that really is impossible.

We all, including his supporters, know that

1. He is responsible for the failed response to the epidemic,
2. Congress has shaped the response to the recession,
3. He has nothing constructive to say or do about systemic racism, because he himself is a racist, and
4. President Putin is his control.

Trump still has a significant but declining coalition based on white nationalism, evangelical Christianity, and right-wing cultural issues, including abortion, gay rights, and and support for religious schools. But he has already lost the popular vote, if only because he will lose New York State and California by landslides while in Texas and Florida he can do no better than eke out a narrow win. Nothing he can do between now and November 3 will change those dynamics, which may turn worse for him rather than better. Unless he really botches this campaign, Joe Biden will get at least five million more votes than Trump, coming close to doubling Hillary Clinton’s margin.

Trump can however still win in the Electoral College, which is all that really counts. For the non-Americans in my readership, let me explain that the winner in an American election gets the most “electoral votes,” which are not distributed proportionally to population of each the states. Less populous states are far more heavily weighted in the distribution of “electoral votes.” Systems like this are known to political scientists as “consociationalism,” or more simply as “power-sharing.” They do not accord “one person one vote.”

Donald Trump’s support is concentrated in more rural, less populous states, so he can lose the popular vote but still win in the Electoral College. It is not a thing or a place but a date in January on which “electors” in each of the states meet in their own capitals to cast their votes, in most states for the winner of the popular vote in that state, and send them to Washington for tabulation.

Even that cockamamie process may not be able to give Trump the help he needs. He is weakening in “red” (reliably Republican) states and polling behind Biden in key “battleground” (swing or purple) states. He is losing ground among whites, even white males but especially white women in the suburbs. The Economist has Biden with about a 9 in 10 chance of winning the Electoral College. No incumbent has come back from Trump’s kind of polling in recent decades and his numbers are declining (courtesy of G. Elliott Morris):

If things continue in the current direction, Biden could end up with more than 400 electoral votes (270 out of 538 are needed to win), which would be remarkable (Trump won with 304 in 2016).

If the Democrats do win in a landslide and take not only the White House but also the Senate and the House of Representatives, the stage will be set for a dramatic swing of the pendulum. Even a return to moderate politics after the extremism of the Trump years will give us all a big jolt. Biden is no radical, but he will feel the push of his party to the left on race, environment, healthcare, taxation, and other issues.

On the foreign policy front, Biden will return to a more traditional American approach: multilaterally when we can, unilaterally when we must. He’ll be a much more full-throated supporter of liberal democracy and NATO, try to take America back into the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, and possibly even the Trans Pacific Partnership, reverse Trump’s support for Israeli expansionism, and try to find ways of peacefully counterbalancing Russia and China. Experience counts in foreign policy. Biden has lots of it.

First though he has to win. The election is just four months off. If Trump continues to alienate swing voters and the economic recovery stalls, you can bet on a more familiar patriotism for next July.