The message from the 2020 election? The US still stands divided
Few saw this knife-edge US election result coming. But no one can say they 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. But the polls never intend to get the result wrong. They have a vested interest – as do the media that commission them – in getting it right. The problems that the pollsters can’t lick is that they don’t reach the right people, and that some people tell lies. Or just keep quiet. Who knew?
That happened in 2016. Now it has happened again in 2020. Even if Joe Biden wins, it implies that the Democrats were fighting the wrong campaign. Biden was a good candidate, but he campaigned as if the Covid-19 pandemic was the main issue. Millions of liberals agreed. But the white working-class voters in the rust belt and upper-midwest states who delivered victory to Trump in 2016 have not changed their minds. They elected Trump for all the very serious reasons that quickly became a consensus explanation in 2016: 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.
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