RFI's David Coffey spoke to former US diplomat William Jordan about what we can take from events overnight following Tuesday's polls in the United States? The economy, racial injustice and coronavirus were the 3 main campaign issues on the trail this year. But did they resonate with the electorate?
William Jordan: I think [they] resonated with the electorate, but perhaps not in the way at least for those supporting Donald Trump that experts prior to this race imagined and certainly not how the Biden campaign imagined it would be.
In fact, I've been thinking to myself that there's always been this talk about the small number of undecided voters who are out there. I think that their indecision wasn't so much about whether they were going to support Donald Trump or whether they were going to support Joe Biden. Because I think that for Donald Trump, so many things have been priced into him for so long, that you knew what you were getting if you voted for Donald Trump.
And when you you raised all of those issues ... that they were actually voting, believe it or not against the Coronavirus and the continuation of the focus on the Coronavirus.
And what they really were sending a message to everybody about what they wanted to move beyond the Coronavirus and do exactly as Donald Trump has been saying for a long time and get back to focusing on the economy... to bring it back to where it was prior to the beginning of the pandemic.
For a lot of people it comes down to their perception over reality. And it's very much, dependent on who you are, your age, your health and all the rest of it.
DC: But moving away from the pandemic, let's look at the Lincoln project. This was basically "Republicans against Trump" - anyone but Trump. And that bloc within the Republican Party failed to redefine the direction of the Republican Party away from Trumpism. So instead of the pilloried "Liberal elites" among the Democrats, were they thrown into the same mix as a kind of "Pinko Republican Elite?"
WJ: Well, there's an often referred-to abbreviation called Rino: "Republican in name only" that Trump uses and other people have used to describe Republicans who basically are so moderate, and maybe personally liberal, that they're really not Republicans, they're more soft Democrats.
So they're people who just don't want to join the Democratic Party for what you know, for personal family reasons and that kind of thing. And I think that the Lincoln project, despite the fact that it sort of stems from this "never Trumper" movement within the Republican Party going back to the 2016 campaign, it was always doomed to fail in as much as within the Republican Party.
The prevailing wind that ultimately propelled Donald Trump to the presidency, has been a populist one has been a very far right, nationalist, nativist, non traditional republican one. And all the Lincoln project and people like them have gotten is they've marginalised themselves. And I don't see how these "never Trumpers" or the Lincoln project people could possibly ever get back into the Republican Party.
As far as Republican Party is concerned, they're gone. They're forgotten, or irrelevant.
DC: So they've been kicked to the margins. And indeed, that brings me to, one could say, another part of marginalised society, the African American vote and Black Lives Matter. They didn't seem to create a Democrat blue wave either. Are the odds still stacked against African Americans getting out to vote along with gerrymandered constituencies? Or was there more to it this time around?
WJ: I am waiting for a calmer moment when people will be looking at that during the campaign. While the early voting and the various mail voting was going on, there were claims that African Americans were having their ballots returned by a larger number than non African American voters.
And I think all of that needs to come out. Unfortunately, this is something that will only be reviewed and considered as part of the autopsy for this election. I do think that the persisting problems in America, as far as American elections are concerned, in terms of gerrymandering, are the many different rules that apply - not just at the state level, but even at the county level in the United States.
Voting rules - who's able to vote, how they're able to vote, when they're able to vote and whether or not their vote is going to be considered - are mind boggling.
The idea of reforming that [problem] is going to run afoul of the Republican side - the political calculation, as long as the Republicans are in charge of so many of the state legislatures around the US - that political calculation is going to remain to continue to suppress the vote, and particularly the vote among African Americans, simply because that [has been the case] for for so long. It has been the habit, and has been one of the targeted voting groups, as far as Republicans are concerned, where they worry about the possibility of serious challenge by the Democrats.
DC: And when it comes to challenges, Trump himself and his 8000 lawyers (if I'm not mistaken in that figure) won't accept a narrow defeat. And they have already claimed that Democrats are attempting to steal the election. They falsely claim that votes are continuing to be cast, even after the closure of polling stations. So they're really twisting the the narrative here. So, as an American yourself, keeping a close eye on things back home, is the country bracing for another "nod and wink" call to the streets from Donald Trump, invoking Second Amendment rhetoric, as he has done in the recent past?
WJ: How all of this plays out in the in the coming weeks (assuming it goes on that long) is is critical to sort of the idea of a peaceful transition of power in the United States, even if it's just the transition from the administration to his second or her second administration
I mean the people ultimately are supposed to be the final arbiters or judges of whether or not they believe the electoral process has been fair.
The irony this time is that, because people felt motivated to vote one way or another, in this election, running up the voting participation, levels to records not seen for decades in the United States, even in a presidential election.
It's we will be ironic that this all falls apart because of this issue of perceived voter suppression, especially on the part of the president who may or may not end up winning his reelection.
Thank God, so far, we haven't seen a lot of the incidents of voter intimidation that seemed to be a prospect prior to the election. But you know, I think much depends, first of all, on how the President himself plays this. And we saw last night that he is already decided to double down on this rhetoric that he'd already employed in the past about about stealing votes.
It remains to be seen how his lawyers are actually going to make their cases on this.
I don't think we'll see the worst until we reach a point where this actually reaches court. And Donald Trump takes things to some next level in terms of his rhetoric.
DC: Finally, no matter what the outcome of this election, the past 24 hours have just underlined that the USA is more divided than ever. And but it would also indicate, again, the complete failure the opinion poll industry.
WJ: Well, I will go a step further, David and say that I think that it also underscores the the manifest weaknesses and failures of the the laws and the voting system in the United States.
I mean, the fact that we have this rather anarchic system of voting laws, you know, apportioned out by states for something as important as the presidential election, just makes a mockery of American efforts in our American claims that I used when I was a diplomat. I had to spout to various governments that we were a paragon of democratic perfection as close to it as human beings could get this is this... This makes the United States a laughingstock in the eyes of the world [and] there are people who just do not understand how this kind of thing can happen.
Added to that, yes, you're right.I think that there's a manifest problems with how polling is done. And this is going to require people to go back again to make a point of covering themselves by saying 'well, this is what we this is how we see it.'
This is how the policy at the polls have learned a lot of the lessons of the past.
But this is no guarantee that this is how it's going to be... polls are just a photograph in time of how things look. I suspect that's going to come up again.
But getting back to my earlier point about how I think people actually approach this election [on the pro-Trump side] is that a lot of the pollsters, and a lot of the people who are applying these statistical methods are looking at this from a more rational point of view than I think a lot of the voters.
I think that voters in the United States have been increasingly been motivated by perception and emotion. And the two inevitably mix.
The electorate is far more volatile, especially when they have the option of voting for somebody like Donald Trump, who defies all the traditional, normal characteristics of a politician.
Polling just is not able to deliver sort of the predictive certainty that people want.
But I don't expect that four years hence, they [polling agencies] are going to get it any more right than they did this time in 2016... or in various other instances in the past 50 or 60 years.
