National Post (National Edition)
THREE PAGES OF COMMENTARY INCLUDING REX MURPHY, SEAN SPEER AND TERRY GLAVIN
ELECTIONS, ONCE UPON A TIME, WERE ABOUT SETTLING THINGS. — MURPHY
Holding a national election in a democracy of well over 300-million people is a huge and complicated undertaking at the best of times. To perform that task during a pandemic makes for even more of a challenge. If it is a contest to decide whether U.S. President Donald Trump gets a second term or not — with all the partisan passion he inspires in both supporters and opponents — then that election becomes extremely challenging.
With the exception of a few philosophers and Zen masters, Trump reaches into the emotions of every American, inspiring, it seems to me, the full gamut of reactions in both positive and negative directions. You've seen those massive gatherings he summoned in the last days of the campaign, which, as I noted in my past column, were larger, more intense and more enthusiastic than even the great multitudes that former president Barack Obama brought out when he was at the height of his charisma and support.
On the opposite side, he was firing up equal numbers of people and passions of the opposite kind — though not in any assembly, the Joe Biden campaign having chosen a very tepid approach to public appearances.
The one word that describes President Trump's entire tenure (he remains president regardless of the result till January) is the same word that characterizes Tuesday night's incomprehensibly cluttered results: tension. There has been a continuous, strong and even potentially dangerous tension in the American political scene since the New York businessman staggered everyone — voters, reporters and the Hillary Clinton campaign — by winning in 2016.
Mindful of that factor, and how polarized Americans have grown, what was most needed Tuesday night was a result of some kind. A result, either way, but a determinative verdict that was unambiguous and beyond any but the silliest of challenges.
Americans needed clarity. They needed a definitive answer to the question of who would be their president for the next four years, and a release from the continuous tensions that have turned their nation into two divided camps.
A real result, while it would wound the side that lost, Trump's supporters or Biden's, would impose a clarity that hopefully would have allowed the passions to subside and some normalcy to return to the country's greatly agitated politics. Certainty has a calming function.
Instead, Tuesday's night's count was in this one particular way the worst possible outcome. It decided, at least for the time being, absolutely nothing at all. It was — and is — unfinished. After that long night, the political patient is still in the operating theatre, the great drama still awaits a last act.
Now, there will be post-election night counts, close calls to make, minute-by-minute comment from the wild anchor desks of the cable news channels, lawyers by the shipload bearing down on every possible challenge — all this during the psychological strains of COVID-19. As a result, Americans will see the tensions that already afflict them start to swell and spread.
It's worse than the Gore vs. Bush result of 2000, with the hanging chads, the court decisions and the political civil war in Florida.
And were all that not enough, there is one other element to be noted: those damn polls were wrong again. The majority of polls throughout most of the campaign were assuring Americans that a clear result was coming. Some predicted a blue wave that would project the Democrats not only into the White House, but give them control of the House and the Senate, as well.
Polls ignite expectations, but when those expectations are utterly routed by reality, they bring on either anger, or plant the seeds of conspiracy theories. At the New York Post, John Podhoretz, reflecting on the always-wrong projections of national political polls, wrote: “We should have known better than to listen. But we were lulled by the terminology devised by the lousy writers who control the nonsense language of social science — by the `95 per cent confidence intervals' and the `margin of error' and `non-response bias.' I agree with his call: “down with polls.”
Elections, once upon a time, were about settling things, about a full contest over opposing views submitted to the citizenry for a verdict, and that verdict, once delivered, was accepted by all.
Tuesday night came and went without a verdict, offered neither satisfaction nor clarity to either side and risks pushing the hyper-partisan divisions in the United States to even newer and more desperate heights.