US battleground states will determine the election

By Darren Kew

As the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, the United States still features a number of antiquated elements to its system.  The US Constitution was written in 1787, and yet in the past two and a half centuries, it has only been amended 27 times, chiefly because it is extremely difficult to do so–two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures have to ratify them to pass.  America’s Constitutional crafters were an elite bunch who did not deeply trust the wisdom of the masses, and so built certain safeguards into the system designed to help “correct” any decisions of the electorate that might threaten the interests of the landed gentry of the time.

One of those safeguards was the electoral college, which was placed as a buffer between the popular vote and the actual choice for president.  Instead of allowing for a simple path to victory – meaning that the person with the most votes would win, as is the case in the House and Senate – America’s Constitutional crafters created a system wherein the candidate who receives the most votes in each state receives all of its electoral votes, which are determined by the number of federal representatives they have, which are reflective of population. 

When a candidate wins a state, their party gets to choose one representative – an elector – for each electoral vote, and those electors then meet to vote for the president, and that decision is what decides who is president.  The idea was that these electors could choose a different candidate for president if the people voted for someone who was an obvious threat to the republic.  Although one or two electors over the years have occasionally voted against their candidate (known as “faithless electors”) in the last 233 years, electors have never abandoned their candidate enough to change the outcome.

What has happened, however, is that the electoral college slightly inflates the numerical strength of smaller states, such that in close elections, a candidate can win the popular vote but still lose the election.  This is exactly what happened to Al Gore in 2000 and Hilary Clinton in 2016.  George Bush won Florida by 539 individual ballots and Donald Trump won Pennsylvania by less than a percentage point, but because of the electoral college, they then earned Florida’s entire 29 and Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, respectively, putting them over the top to win (270 is the minimum amount for victory), even though they lost populous states like California and New York by wide margins.  Whether or not former Vice President Joe Biden wins liberal California tomorrow by 51 or 99 percent, he still gets only 55 electoral votes.

Consequently, the US swing states that could go either direction are getting almost all of the candidates’ attention.  Large urban states like California, New York, and Illinois are certain to vote for Biden, and President Trump is assured of a batch of small midwestern and southern states that are Republican strongholds, such that this election will likely be determined by a handful of states that could go either way.  Chief among these are Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Biden’s lead in the electoral college is large enough among his safe states that he only needs to win one of these states to win the presidency.  Trump, on the other hand, is far enough behind that he needs to win all of these states, plus one more – Arizona – in order to stay in the White House. 

President Trump, however, is far from beaten yet.  Analysts at FiveThirtyEight.com say that the latest opinion polls give Trump a one-in-ten chance of winning, which is a long shot, but not impossible.  That is because Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina tend to lean Republican, and the president tends to do a couple points better in the voting booth than he does in opinions polls (some Trump supporters won’t identify themselves as such when called on the phone by opinion pollsters), so he may still have a good chance of flipping those states back on election night.  The latest polls suggest that Florida is a bit more of a stretch for the president, but it is his home state, and he could definitely win there if his supporters show up in force and the Democrats have a poorer turnout.

That leaves Pennsylvania for Biden to win, and explains why the state has been the focus of massive attention from both parties.  Biden grew up in Pennsylvania and the state has traditionally been a Democratic stronghold, going heavily for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.  President Trump, however, flipped the state in 2016, capitalising on working class white communities’ frustrations with job insecurity from globalisation, as well as tepid support for Clinton among African American and other traditionally Democratic-leaning voters.

Legendary Democratic election guru James Carville famously referred to Pennsylvania as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between,” meaning that the state’s two major cities are heavily Democratic, but the rest of the state is as conservative as Alabama in the American south.  If Democratic voters in urban Pittsburgh and Philadelphia turn out heavily today, then Biden will sit in the White House on January 20.  If, however, more of those voters skip out as they did in 2016 and the suburban and rural surge for Trump shows up again at the polls, the president may have a fighting chance.

Complicating matters in Pennsylvania is that the state is allowing mail-in votes to be counted up to three days after election day, meaning that voters can mail them on Election Day itself (many other states are saying the ballots must be received by Tuesday).  If the election is close, national attention may be turned to Pennsylvania to see how each of these mail-in votes are counted.  Armies of Republican and Democratic lawyers are already active with lawsuits to try to sway the vote-counting in their direction, with Republicans seeking to make it more difficult to count mail-in votes under the correct belief these will go more heavily Democratic, submitted by minority and older voters more afraid of COVID and hence more critical of the president’s mishandling of the health crisis, as well as others trusting of the mail-in system.  Such delays will also embolden right wing militias to take action – on Monday, seven incidents of militia violence and threats have already been reported.

Because of COVID, many states expanded mail-in and early voting opportunities, such that an unprecedented 98 million votes have already been cast, more than 70% of the total votes cast during the 2016 election.  Although the Republican base is energised and is without a doubt part of this surge, a high turnout overall is likely bad news for Trump, since Democratic voters slightly outnumber Republicans.  Young voters are supporting Democrats by a 2 to 1 margin, and the early voting shows a large youth presence this time – many of them refused to vote in 2016.  All of this foreshadows a dismal day for the president, but the coffin is not yet closed, and he still has a slim chance of handing the Democrats another horror story much like four years ago.  What would be truly catastrophic for the nation, however, is if he uses the levers of the state and the judiciary to delay the outcome unfairly, creating an election crisis that signals to the rightwing militias to cause chaos. Nigerians know better than anyone where that road leads – let us hope that American leaders opt for true democracy, and not “dem go crazy.”

Kew is a member of Naija Times Editorial Advisory Board, and Associate Professor, Dept of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance; McCormack Graduate School, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA