With less than two days until voting ends in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the results of opinion polls gauging voter preferences between the Republican incumbent, President Donald Trump, and his Democratic challenger, former Vice-President Joe Biden, almost uniformly show that the latter is holding onto a firm lead. A leading poll of polls puts Mr. Biden ahead by a solid 7.8%. A well-regarded data-driven website running statistical models on polls simulated 40,000 possible outcomes to find that Mr. Biden won 90 times out of 100. However, an analysis of politics since January 2017 reveals how voters might regard Mr. Trump’s performance, disregarding what they may have said in response to opinion surveys. He came to power on what was essentially a nativist call to purportedly put “America First”, to fight for the middle-class workers losing jobs to foreigners or immigrants. The divisive rhetoric that his 2016 campaign employed to this end continued to yield rich political dividends for him until early 2020. However, all this changed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an epidemiological challenge that the White House was unable to meet.
This was part bungling, the result of a chaotic executive decision-making, and part apathy, borne of Mr. Trump’s disdain of masks, social distancing and lockdowns. Even in this approach, however unscientific, he may have won voter sympathy, perhaps because some appreciated his desire to reopen the economy, regardless of COVID-19. It is this sentiment that might prove to be Mr. Biden’s undoing as vote tallying comes to a close in the days and weeks, ahead. Therein lies a major force likely to shape the denouement of this election: the pandemic has resulted in a massive shift in the balance of voting methods toward early voting, mail-in voting and absentee voting. Mr. Trump has attacked mail-in voting with factually unfounded claims regarding potential for fraud and a Democratic conspiracy. Given that well over 90 million votes have been cast already through the latter channels, and that far more Republicans and Trump supporters are likely to vote in-person on November 3, the early results will likely show a significant lead for Mr. Trump. If, as is likely, the scales start tipping toward Mr. Biden as the mail-in votes are tallied, the stage will be set for Mr. Trump to formally allege voting fraud and escalate the matter to the Supreme Court — a Court that did not hesitate to rule on the 2000 election favouring Republican George W. Bush. Given that the Republican-controlled Senate recently rushed to fill an empty seat on the Court with conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett, the 6-3 majority on the Court favouring conservatives may well have a bearing in such an eventuality. Only a strong performance by Mr. Biden on election day to add to the early-voting leads will obviate this possibility.
