Biden predicts victory, Trump goes to court For half of Americans, it’s 2016 all over again
How low is the opinion of Donald Trump in the rest of the industrialized, democratic world?
So low that a survey earlier this year found people in 13 other countries thought less of Trump than they did of the autocratic, rights-abusing rulers of China and Russia. Canadians gave him only a slightly higher rating than the average won by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
But no matter who wins Tuesday’s U. S. presidential election, one thing is clear: Americans themselves still support Trump in proportions similar to what they did in 2016, despite four years of turmoil and controversy.
Opinion polls, which once again seem to have been considerably off the mark, had suggested Democrat Joe Biden would win the popular vote by eight percentage points. There were even murmurings of a Biden landslide.
Instead, Trump trailed by just two points — similar to the relative gap last time when he beat hillary Clinton.
It all raises the question: Why does close to half of the u.s. electorate — more than 65 million people — buck the global trend and still consider Trump presidential material?
Exit polls offer some clues. barely a quarter of respondents said they judged the candidates on personality traits, and people rated the economy as a more important issue than the pandemic. One expert says Trump forcefully made the case that the democrats posed an existential threat to u.s. culture.
For liberals, it remained bewildering.
“We wanted to see a repudiation of this direction for the country,” democratic strategist and CNN commentator van Jones lamented Tuesday night. “And the fact that it’s this close, it hurts. It just hurts.”
The election’s final outcome remained up in the air late afternoon Tuesday, though biden seemed to be building a path, barely, to victory in the electoral College.
The democrat led the popular vote by 50.3 to 48.1 per cent for Trump, virtually the same margin as 2016, though both candidates captured more votes amid record turnout.
“Certainly it’s not the blowout that we expected, or that some people expected, and what the polls foretold,” said matt dallek, a political scientist at George Washington university and expert on u.s. conservatism.
He credits in part Trump’s campaign in 2020, which insisted biden was a far-left Trojan horse who would turn the u.s. into a northern Cuba, while letting black Lives matters protesters run amok.
“Trump has really been masterful at tapping into the idea that the other side is this left-wing socialist enemy that is going to de stroy American culture,” said dallek. “he’s really tapped into this alternative media universe — Fox News, breitbart, daily Caller … and created an alternate reality that is fed by these media.”
Nationalist and nativist movements have gained some momentum in other countries recently, but that doesn’t mean Trump has many fans there.
In its regular, multination poll earlier this year, the Pew research Center found confidence in the current u.s. president had sunk to 16 per cent on average in those countries. That’s the lowest for any American president since Pew began the surveys 20 years ago.
About 20 per cent of Canadians said they felt confident in Trump. Across the 13 nations, Xi and Putin won average ratings of 19 and 23 per cent respectively.
Regardless of the merits of his actual policies, Trump’s first term has been marked by deeply controversial behaviour, from prodigious telling of falsehoods to praising international autocrats and using his office to try to obtain political favours from a foreign leader.
But exit polls suggest those kind of character issues may have had limited impact.
Asked what was important in voting for a leader, just 27 per cent of voters pointed to personality, versus 73 per cent who chose the candidate’s stance on the issues.
And while biden hammered constantly at Trump’s handling of the coronavirus that theme may not have resonated widely. Asked about what issues were most important, 35 per cent mentioned the economy, followed by racial equality (20 per cent), the pandemic (17 per cent) and crime and safety (11 per cent), according to the exit polls.
The democrat also emphasized his desire to bring Americans of different political itical stripes together. but “uniting the country” (19 per cent) rated last, below being a strong leader (32 per cent), “caring about people like me” and having good judg-ment, as an important qual-ity for the president.
When the online polling company Survey monkey asked Americans earlier why they approved of Trump, the typical responses were that he had kept his promises, put America first, tried to get things done and reversed the Obama years.
Dallek also suggests a darker reason. While Trump was able to attract more ethnic minorities to vote for him than any republican presidential candidate in a generation, he nevertheless strongly appeals to those Americans who feel alien-ated by the growing power of left-wing progressive pol-itics.
“We’re still living really in the shadow of the Civil War, and he has tapped into these racial grievances,” said the professor. “he is signalling just constantly that there is a more liberal, tolerant, urban, multicultural America that is coming for their culture and their country.
”That said, dallek sug-gested Americans are not so divorced from their West-ern-world cohorts.
Biden did get three mil-lion more votes overall, he noted, and if Trump loses the presidency, he would be one of just five White house oc-cupants in the last century to serve a single term.