What just happened
- The nightmare scenario of an election contested by both sides came true in the US (more below).
- America formally withdrew from the Paris climate accords, which Biden has pledged to rejoin if he wins the White House.
- Boris Johnson told the annual CBI conference he’d do “whatever it takes” to support British businesses through the next phase of the Covid crisis.
Whoever wins, Trump’s paranoid worldview endures. When he claimed victory in his re-election race this morning it wasn’t clear who’d won but it was clear that his base remains solid despite the ravages of Covid; that his talk of socialism under Biden had delivered Florida to his column; and that the most consequential election so far this century could be decided by a Supreme Court in which he’s installed a conservative majority.
He will ask the court to suspend the counting of ballots sent in before election day by voters seeking to protect themselves from a virus that Trump used to say would miraculously disappear. As of today, it has killed 238,641 Americans.
The court may oblige. Last month it upheld a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision to reject a Republican demand for a stay on vote-counting after election day – but only by a 4-4 vote. Since then Amy Coney Barrett has joined the panel.
State of the race. Wide open. Counting could go on until Friday or beyond in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Trump is ahead with roughly three quarters of votes counted, but Team Biden believes it leads among the millions of postal votes as yet untallied. (There are 1.4 million in Pennsylvania alone, where Biden has won 78 per cent of those counted so far. Trump led by 700,000 votes by the end of the night.) Biden has flipped Arizona but not Texas. Georgia is tilting from red to pale blue as Black votes add up in Atlanta. The fallout from the police killing of George Floyd in May could prove decisive after all.
What happened last night?
- There was no blue wave, much less a Biden landslide. He needed Black and Hispanic votes en masse for that but exit polls suggest he won a smaller share of the Latino vote in Florida, Georgia and Ohio than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Would a “pale” wave of white suburban voters compensate, tired of Trump and scared of Covid? In Ohio it turned out to be a ripple.
- Trump crushed Biden’s hopes of tying it all up early in Florida: in Miami-Dade county he squeezed Biden’s winning margin to roughly half Clinton’s four years ago. In the I-40 corridor between Orlando and St Petersburg he lost votes to worried retirees – but not many. In the rural panhandle he swept all before him.
- Florida was America in microcosm: Democrats broke records for early voting, the Republican ground war – waged continuously since 2016 – delivered a surge on the day, and the electorate went to bed more stressed and polarised than ever.
- To judge by exit polls in Georgia, Virginia and elsewhere, Covid’s impact on the economy was as powerful an influence on voters’ thinking as its impact on their health.
What happens next?
- Biden could win by grinding it out in two of the three rust belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but to do so his lawyers will have to beat back Trump’s as they seek to halt the count in the first two on the basis of claims of fraudulent postal voting for which there is no evidence.
- Trump could win if votes as yet uncounted in those three states fall mainly into his column rather than Biden’s.
- The US will agonise over the politicisation of its Supreme Court, already centre stage in a constitutional crisis triggered by a 2am speech in which Trump denounced a “fraud on the American people” and said wearily: “As far as I’m concerned, we’ve already won.”
- The Republican Party will have to accept the new reality: Trumpism was no passing fad. It’s here to stay, and the never-Trumpers who hoped to claim the party back may have to find a new political home elsewhere.
