By Tiko Okoye
The 2020 US elections are billed for Tuesday, November 3, 2020. As many as 13 state and territorial governorships, as well as numerous other state and county elections, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested. But by far the most keenly followed and most widely reported would be the contest for the presidency between Republican Donald Trump, the incumbent president seeking a second term, and Democrat Joe Biden, a former vice-president. Both are septuagenarians – Trump is 74 years old, while Biden is 78. Both also followed a similar trajectory in clinching the nomination of their respective parties.
The Republican Party establishment never wanted to touch Trump even with a mile-long pole. But he went on to not only win the party primaries but also the presidential election. And like his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, recently disclosed in a recently released taped interview, the erstwhile business mogul made short work of accomplishing a “hostile takeover” of the party, such that the fear of Trump has become the beginning of conventional wisdom in the latter-day Grand Old Party (GOP), as the Republican Party is also known!
On his own part, Biden has tried in the past to attain the pinnacle of his illustrious political career but has twice failed to clinch the nomination of the Democratic Party. It was crystal-clear that he was spurned by the party establishment as well as by the rank and file during the early phase of the 2020 primary contests. After embarrassingly finishing a distant fifth in February’s New Hampshire’s primary, he was practically given up for dead. But a predominantly Black electorate in South Carolina breathed a new lease of life into his candidacy and he eventually became the biggest beneficiary of the “Super Tuesday” sweepstakes! Even so, many in his party viewed his nomination with forlorn resignation. They felt he would stumble in debates with Trump and that his gaffes would serve as ample ammunition to an opponent known not to give any quarter in a fight to the death!
But that is where the similarity ends. Both men are actually as different as day is from night. Where Trump is erratic, brusque, impulsive and even reckless, Biden is staid, run-of-the-mill, steady and plodding. Where Trump is daring and sensational, Biden represents an unassuming and empathetic grandfatherly figure – Trump even derisively mocks him with the moniker of “Sleepy Joe.” In fact, Biden can be described as the tortoise to Trump’s hare in that local folklore of a race between both animals.
Nothing fully captures the essence of the times that the 2020 US presidential election is being conducted like that verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.” Indeed, timing is everything in life. The peculiar circumstances of this year’s contest – a devastating pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and an economic collapse throwing millions into the labour market and making those still employed very nervous and vulnerable – call for the very same character traits that would have marked a candidate like Biden as a weak leader under a different scenario. Talk of the stone the builders rejected suddenly becoming the chief cornerstone!
And, the election just around the corner, Biden appears to hold an unassailable double-digit national lead and narrower but stable leads in many battleground states that Trump won in 2016. To make matters worse, Biden has even become very competitive in previously solid GOP states like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio where he is leading Trump in the polls!
But Biden and the Democrats are far from being complacent. They know that Trump is the grandmaster of the “Art of the Deal,” and that the higher the stakes and the more daunting the odds, the greater the likelihood of getting Trump’s adrenalin dangerously up and going! They very well remember that at about this same time four years ago Clinton Hilary was similarly leading Trump in almost every poll, only for Trump to put political pundits and bookmakers to shame by winning the crucial Electoral College vote. Still, the circumstances between 2016 and 2020 are very different in several important aspects.
In addition to the earlier mentioned poor handling of the rampaging coronavirus pandemic by Trump, Biden is nowhere as controversial a figure as Hilary was. A most recent Fox News survey – Trump’s favourite network – has Biden, very much unlike Hilary, with a 16% net positive favourability rating, compared with a 10% net negative rating for Trump. The reckless manner that Trump has been adjudged to have handled the pandemic by one of the most vulnerable segments of the population – the elderly and senior citizens – has lost him crucial support among older voters, especially in Florida State with a relatively high proportion of retirees.
Grave errors in sampling techniques that caused a great disparity between expected and final outcomes, such as polls not weighted by values like education to allow for those without college degrees who are less likely to respond to surveys and more likely to vote for Trump, have been corrected, resulting in more credible polling.
Polling simulation analyses conducted by some leading experts, where averages of the stronger 2020 polls were adjusted as if they were as wrong as they were in 2016, indicate that Biden is still on course to win the Electoral College vote even if he were to lose Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin where polls show him leading by at least three points – probable but unlikely. On the other hand, Trump has to win every major battleground state to be re-elected – not impossible but highly unlikely, and a much more daunting hurdle than that confronting Biden.
The third-party candidacy of Jill Stein (Green Party) spit enough liberal votes to gift Trump razor-thin victories over Hilary in the three key Great Lakes Area states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that clinched the Electoral College vote for Trump. There is no such relatively strong liberal-leaning third-party candidate to afflict a political heartburn on Biden. In 2016, an important block of the Democratic Party supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders chose to abstain rather than vote for Hilary. But Biden and Sanders have a very cordial personal relationship and the traditionally atomistic Democratic Party has surprisingly been able to energise all its factions to work in unison to elect Biden. On the contrary, an increasing number of top officials that served in the Trump administration and “The Lincoln Project” – the political organisation founded by Republicans united against Trump, are openly flaunting their support for Biden.
And very few would doubt that the highly controversial decision of then-FBI Director James Comey – based entirely on a Russian-fed misinformation – to brew a storm in a teacup with the Hilary Clinton email controversy few days to the election largely cost her the presidency. The intelligence and security agencies as well as the electorate are now better prepared for such external shenanigans, as evidenced by how the plot to use the faux “Hunter Biden laptop,” allegedly containing emails depicting the Bidens as a family willing to peddle political influence for person gain, failed to produce any real traction outside pro-Trump conservative media outlets. Early voting has already surpassed nearly three-quarters of the about 130million aggregate votes cast in 2016, and it is relatively safe to say that no eleventh hour surprise at this stage – euphemistically dubbed “October surprise” – would hurt either candidate.
My predictions? Best case scenario: A landslide victory for Biden both in terms of popular and Electoral College votes – of a kind not experienced since 1984 when Ronald Reagan took Democratic challenger Walter Mondale to the cleaners. Worst case scenario: Trump would prove yet again to be the political cat with nine lives – but Biden would win the popular vote by a margin not less than six million, and win the Electoral College vote by the slimmest of margins.
And now this: The Democrats would gain a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and ultimately pack the Supreme Court to create a level playing jurisprudential field just to undo what Trump and the Republican-dominated upper chamber have done to disingenuously lock in a 6-3 conservative majority. There is a saying in the Niger Delta to the effect that Cunny man die, cunny man bury am!
Ichie Tiko Okoye, a Boston University Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow, wrote in from Abuja – 08054103468