Biden seems very likely to get the most votes, it remains to be seen if that's enough to win the White House.
As November draws closer I’ve tried to keep up with American politics as best I can, and have noticed that many of the commentators I’ve read and listened to repeat a themes; that many seem to believe that Joe Biden’s victory is almost. This narrative seem popular, though I’m prone to sample biases as an outside observer. In this week’s post I want to discuss this idea, and give a reminder that while history does not repeat, it does rhyme.
The idea that Biden is likely to win seems plausible, after all President Trump has had a bad year with a pandemic, a recession and wide-spread social unrest; so it wouldn’t come as a surprise if Americans choose to blame the President. The Economist predicts that Biden as of the day of writing has an 89% chance of winning the electoral college and a 98% chance of winning the popular vote, and while I share their view that Biden will probably win the popular vote as the elections of 2000 and 2016 have shown, winning the popular vote isn’t the same thing as winning the election. American elections often hinge on turnout, in the 2016 presidential election there was a turnout of 56% and given that it seems that democrats are more worried about the pandemic than republicans that could give Trump better chances than he otherwise would have. I wouldn’t write off President Trump yet, most did in 2016 and we all know how that turned out.
For all the talk of America being a great democracy there have been five Presidential elections where the candidate with the most votes have lost, as mentioned two of which where in the last twenty years. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump held on to his office by winning the electoral college even if Biden gets more votes, let’s just hope that Americans can realise the many flaws that the current system has so that it ca be a more true democracy in the future.
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Written by Karl Johansson
Sources:
The Economist - https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president
Cover Photo by Aaron Kittredge from Pexels
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