WASHINGTON I’ve often been asked in my spare time what my true assessment is of whether it can About Donald Trump still become president.
In general, I cautiously respond that it is not the job of journalists to speculate or predict. We report what we know for sure.
It’s been a year since the election this Sunday, so of course you can’t know the outcome. A lot can happen in a year in the United States and in the world, and a lot can change. A single mass shooting can mobilize young voters before an election, or a drastic erosion of women’s rights can have a significant impact on the outcome of the vote.
Right now, however, it seems that Trump is surprisingly strong. Despite the fact that Trump has been indicted on several counts, he has attempted a coup d’état, and he hasn’t even been officially selected as the Republican nominee yet.
The American people are extremely divided, and the election is most likely going to be a repeat of 2020. In that election, Biden won. If all voters who voted then voted the same way, Biden would win.
In the end, the election will be decided by who votes. This, too, is primarily influenced by three factors, about which a lot can already be said: voting practices, candidates and election enthusiasm.
It doesn’t matter in the finals is only a standard language in the states.
Because of the US electoral system, a candidate can get more votes nationwide and still lose the election. The winner of the election is determined according to the so-called electoral system.
The winner is the candidate who receives more than 270 electoral votes. Each state has a number of electors proportional to its population, and all votes go to the candidate with the most votes in the state, except Maine and Nebraska.
The winner of many states is already known, as several states have voted either Republican or Democrat year after year. For example, Oklahoma’s electoral votes have gone to the Republican candidate since the 1970s. Minnesota has voted for a Democrat for president for almost as long.
The elections will therefore only be decided in a handful of states where the competition is genuinely tight. In the last election, eight states in particular were contested: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Biden won the election because he won all of those states except Florida and North Carolina. In some places, very narrowly – for example, in Georgia and Arizona, Biden beat Trump by less than one percentage point of the vote, with a difference of only a little over 20,000 votes in total.
Therefore, it is clear that Biden could not lose a single vote in order to win, and that is quite a challenge in the current situation.
The most significant difference in the last compared to the elections, is that at the time of 2020, many states had made voting by mail easier than normal due to the pandemic.
This led to a significant jump in the popularity of postal voting. In the 2016 and 2018 elections, only about a quarter voted by mail, in 2020 more than 40 percent voted this way. Voting by mail was especially preferred by Biden’s voters, in part because Democratic voters were more cautious about the corona than Republicans.
Postal voting made voting significantly easier and was a structural enabler of record-breaking turnout.
In the upcoming elections, mail-in voting practices will change significantly in several states, but the most electorally significant changes will occur in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. In these states, voting by mail is a little more difficult in the first election than in the last election.
Both Republicans and Democrats vote by mail, so making it harder to vote doesn’t unequivocally hit either party. In Arizona, for example, up to 80 percent of Republicans have voted by mail in statewide elections.
Still, any rules that make it harder to vote are inherently more of a concern to Democrats than Republicans. As one Arizona Republican analyst noted in a background interview: Republicans vote rain or shine.
Democrat voters are more unreliable. Therefore, even small changes to voting laws affect the voting activity of Democrats rather than Republicans.
This was seen, for example, in the 2016 elections, which Donald Trump won by narrow margins in, for example, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, 14 states enacted new voting restriction laws. One of those states was Wisconsin, where the number of votes cast fell significantly in 2016.
After the 2020 election, dozens of states have changed or are in the process of changing voting laws. Changes have also been made in electorally important states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Some of the laws make voting more difficult, for example by limiting or preventing the number of ballot delivery places used in the 2020 elections. On the other hand, voting has also been made easier in many states, for example by expanding early voting opportunities on the spot at polling stations.
It is difficult to tell the effect of the laws before the elections, because a lot depends on, for example, how the information about the new requirements is communicated to the voters. It requires a lot of legwork from civic organizations and party activists.
Where are the Democrats coming from? to the biggest problem: Biden is basically not a candidate who would drive the masses wild, even within his own party.
In an opinion poll published by CNN in the fall, more than 80 percent of those who primarily vote for Democrats said that they would not like to see Joe Biden in a second term.
So Biden may well lose votes in the first election, because voters simply don’t go, or they vote for other candidates.
Candidates from minor parties cannot, in principle, win states, but for example an independent candidate heading to the elections Robert Kennedy may manage to take a few thousand votes from Biden.
In states with tight margins, it would rain in Trump’s box, because Trump’s voters are more loyal than Biden’s voters. In the field, I have noticed that Kennedy’s events are mostly attended by former voters of Biden.
In the 2020 election, many voted for Biden to vote against Trump. In terms of next year, the biggest question is whether the same motivation will be found again.
Trump’s trials may remind Democratic voters of what lies ahead.
In last year’s midterm elections, abortion restrictions and concerns about Trump-backed boycotters drove Democrats to the ballot box, and in Pennsylvania and Arizona, for example, Democrats won major elections.
In those elections, however, Trump himself was not on the ballot, so not all of Trump’s voters voted.
A lot can happen before the elections, but the outcome is clear. Biden is not in as strong a position as a sitting president would be expected to be when it’s Trump.
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