Horse 2775 - Predicting The Result Of The US Presidential Election
I didn't end up writing a prediction piece for the 2020 Presidential Election because at no stage since it was obvious who the candidates were going to be, did the favourable vs unfavourable opinion of Donald Trump move outside of the window of 38%-44% approval and no matter how often I tried to plug the relevant numbers into swing calculators for the Presidency, did I ever get a clear answer. In fact, I saw several opinion polls which indicated that the final outcome hinged upon one or two states swinging in either direction and as such, living with that kind of ambiguity in the data, made any meaningful prediction impossible. In fact, as I write this, it is still possible for this whole thing to end in a 269-269 draw.
The question isn't so much what went wrong for the Democratic Party because should Donald Trump win again, that mean that for the second time in a row and the sixth time in history, the President will have been elected upon an unpopular vote basis (which means to say that Hamilton's idea for the Electoral College is actually working as intended).
Hamilton who was either hideously naive or willfully blind, proposed the Electoral College as a way of giving the smaller states a deliberately unequal say in how the President would be selected. If it had come down to purely based upon population, then the slave owning southern states would have been able to collectively control the Presidency for the immediate future; so Hamilton's solution was to declare some people as being worth only 3/5ths of a person upon the basis of race, then by deliberately over egging the pudding in favour of the mostly white people in the north east (which his own New York State was a part of).
Fast forward two hundred years and following the erosion of the Voting Rights Act 1965 by a series of cases in the Supreme Court and unless there is a massive shift from the cities to the fly-over states, we have again arrived at a situation where there is an outsized voice of white people living in predominantly rural areas. While it is true that there is a very fine strip of black voters across three states in the south, unless there is a major radical shift in politics, the results of elections are determined upon the blinking apathy of white males who either do or do not go to the polls. Demographically speaking, America's elections are now decided by two massive factions; which if you strip away the cladding of political parties, resolves to just two main categories of "white people" and "not white people".
Where does this leave us? In trouble, that's where; whatever the result.
If I were to tell you that there was a political coup where the legitimacy of the election was being brought into question, in a country where there are more than a billion guns and roughly a trillion bullets in circulation, and that country had a history of oppression of minorities, and that country was a nuclear power, that should normally give you cause for setting off the six bell fire alarm. This is kind of situation where the UN would send in impartial observers to make sure that the elections were conducted fairly. Yet this is precisely what we have in the United States as of this moment.
If I may draw your attention back to the first parallel that I can think of, in 2009 the Former President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed victory before counting finished. In that instance, both Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and their respective sets of supporters claimed that electoral fraud had occurred. In that instance, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stepped in and formally endorsed Ahmadinejad but it led to 19 months of violence on the streets in Tehran especially and in retaliation also led to arrest, imprisonment and torture of protesters.
Another set of parallels that can be drawn was that after Ahmadinejad has seized power, he claimed that there had been foreign interference in the election; especially from either Israel or the United States, while Israel claimed that the Iranian Government itself had hired Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon on a contract basis to fight protesters.
America probably won't head down that road but the fact that the President is claiming that the election process is broken before it has even run its course as a normal election, says that America was prepared to tolerate and enable someone who was not only eminently unsuitable for the office but actively terrible for both it and democracy.
It's not like any of this wasn't known beforehand either. Mr Trump was asked if he would accept the results of the election if he lost and this was met with the response of "we'll see"; which is exactly the same response that people with power usually give when the answer will eventually be "no" but they want to appear to be diplomatic.
Hamilton either devised or endorsed the Electoral College because in 1787, the distances across the 13 United States was measured not in miles but days. The idea of sending Electors was to stop someone from being elected to the role of head of the executive and the head of the armed forces, if it was found in the intervening months which followed that the incoming person would be unsuited to be President. Some state constitutions have now bound the Electors to the result of the election; which has subsequently been upheld by the Supreme Court. Thus, the inbaked issues with the underlying states' demographics remain allowed to stand and indeed endorsed by law.
If I am forced to pick this election, even after it has been held (which itself is an absolutely bonkers crazy go nuts situation), then my prediction is as follows.
The 2020 Presidential Election was ultimately pointless and the last fifteen months have been a waste of time.
Both sides will launch claim and counter claim in the courts and the whole thing will be taken to the Supreme Court for an omnibus decision. The results of this election were determined four years ago and irrespective of who has voted for whom now, the result of the election will be that Trump will be the next President by a margin of.
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