During the night, a red wave colored the electoral map of the United States. Georgia and North Carolina first. Then, a few hours later, Pennsylvania. One by one, the key states won by Joe Biden in 2020 are falling like dominoes into the hands of the Republicans. At the end of the morning, everything is confirmed: Donald Trump will indeed be the next tenant of the White House. Nothing very surprising according to Lenny Bronner, data journalist at Washington Post.
L’Express: The results are not yet final, but announce a Republican tidal wave. Did you expect such a scenario?
Lenny Bronner: We had not bet on this scenario being the most likely, but we were prepared for this eventuality. The gap between the two candidates in the polls being very small, we anticipated that errors could lead to a situation where one of the two candidates would have the possibility of winning the seven key states, which seems to be looming. Polling errors are often correlated. That is to say, if they occur in one state in favor of a candidate, they have a good chance of being duplicated in others.
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© / The Express
The election results appear much closer than expected. Were the pollsters wrong?
In most key states, the final results are unlikely to differ much from what polls had predicted. In Georgia and North Carolina, the polls are expected to be pretty close to the final results. Just like in Arizona. In Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, there might be a bit more polling error, but that should only amount to a 1% or 2% difference. A difference which therefore remains within the range of our expectations.
On the other hand, I think that the margin of error will be greater in certain Democratic states, such as New York or New Jersey. The reason? Polls were lower there than in swing states. This is probably a lesson that we will have to learn for the future. It certainly makes more sense to survey territories where the result is close, but we should not ignore other states where larger movements could occur.
What tools does Kamala Harris have at her disposal if she wishes to challenge Donald Trump’s victory?
In some states, there are automatic recounts if the results are very close. Campaign teams can also request it if the margin is very small. Legal recourse is also possible, but I have not heard of it yet.
How do you interpret Kamala Harris’ silence? Is it normal for her to take time before expressing herself?
In 2016, which is the closest analogy, the election was called a little earlier, which allowed Hillary Clinton to deliver a defeat speech. At the end of the evening, we did not yet have official confirmation of Donald Trump’s victory, even if many indications pointed to a defeat for the Democrats. In this context, I think it makes sense that Kamala Harris would not give a speech at 4 or 5 a.m. and would rather wait until the next day. She perhaps also did not expect that the result would come so quickly, and that Donald Trump’s victory would be so clear.
Do you think the Democratic Party should have chosen another candidate to take on Trump after Biden withdrew?
The question of whether a primary should have happened after Joe Biden withdrew has been much discussed and will likely be even more so after Kamala Harris’ defeat. But to date, there is no guarantee that another Democratic candidate would have performed better.
Has the unpopularity of the Democratic camp, after four years of the Biden administration, been underestimated?
If we step back and look at elections in the rest of the world, we see that the parties in power are, for various reasons, very unpopular. The inflation that we observe throughout the Western world as well as the question of immigration have nothing to do with it. In the United States, this latest debate has been particularly intense in recent months. Kamala Harris has tried to distance herself from the Biden administration, but perhaps too marginally to have an impact. However, it is difficult to say that greater detachment could have been possible. She is still the current vice-president of this administration! Voters probably would not have believed in total distancing. In addition, the 2022 midterm elections were particularly favorable to the Democratic Party, while it is often a sanction election for the party in power. The 2024 presidential election could therefore well be the real 2022 mid-term election that never took place.
Why has Kamala Harris, the first woman of color on the way to the White House, not managed to generate the same enthusiasm as Barack Obamafirst African-American president of the United States?
First: although Kamala Harris has been compared a lot to Barack Obama, they actually have quite different personalities. Second: Obama’s candidacy came after eight years of a particularly unpopular Republican administration, punctuated by two extremely maligned wars, a financial crisis and a climate catastrophe – Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – which have left serious after-effects in American society. In 2008, he embodied the break. In 2024, Kamala Harris represents the continuity of the last four years which have also been complicated for Americans. More generally, Kamala Harris’ biggest problem is probably being associated with an administration held responsible for the internal difficulties that have arisen in recent years.
One of Trump’s biggest challenges was mobilizing beyond his core base. Did he succeed in doing so or was his victory due to a massive mobilization of his supporters?
We will probably have to wait a few months before we get the full picture of this election. The first observation is that this is an election with a high participation rate. In many places, Democrats are registering a higher mobilization rate than they had anticipated. But the Republicans managed to mobilize even more people. This suggests that they were able to rally beyond their main base.
Furthermore, there are many places where we observe a real right turn. Not all the ballots have been counted yet, but we could see that New York, New Jersey and a few other Democratic states have swung ten points toward Republicans who have demonstrated real persuasiveness. This right-wing phenomenon is also confirmed in many regions where the Hispanic community is very present. In the most Hispanic counties of Texas, for example, the Republican vote increased by 15 to 20 points. For some counties, support for Donald Trump even climbed to almost 30 points. This can be explained by the fact that a majority of Hispanic Americans are socially conservative and live very close to the border, therefore on the front lines of the migration crisis.
Republicans won a majority of Senate seats. They could also keep the House of Representatives. For its part, the Supreme Court has, since Donald Trump’s first term, been made up of a majority of conservative judges. Does this mean that he will have complete freedom of action?
The Republicans could in fact control all institutional branches. In the Senate, they should obtain 52 seats, which will allow moderate Republicans who are not fond of Donald Trump’s radicalism to bother him in the application of his program. The new president’s room for maneuver will therefore depend on his ability to conclude agreements with this fringe of the Grand Old Party. Because he will need their support to confirm some of the people he wishes to appoint and, obviously, to implement his program.
Concerning the House of Representatives, we are still awaiting the results. But the Republican majority will probably be very weak, with only 4 or 6 seats ahead. There will therefore be a lot of negotiations within the party to actually be able to pass laws. But in recent years, Republicans have not shown that they are particularly good at negotiating within their own party. They had many internal clashes. But in any case, Trump will not be able to implement his program without the support of moderate Republicans.
What importance should we give to Donald Trump’s rhetoric in recent hours, considered more measured and unifying?
We have already witnessed this type of speech from him several times. So far, they have not really materialized into concrete measures. But it is also his last term, so the situation is different from that of his first stint in the Oval Office.
Could Donald Trump modify the institutional architecture of the United States? Many fear he is trying to undermine democracy.
Certain aspects of the American democratic system are the responsibility of the norm and not the law. However, he has shown on numerous occasions that he does not have much regard for standards. So he could get through it. Concerning what falls under the legislative domain, having a majority in all chambers and in the Supreme Court, it could modify some of these laws. But these majorities are not large enough to go so far as to modify the foundations of American democracy, which are constitutional laws. Moderate Republicans would never vote for such changes.
Is Donald Trump arriving at the White House even stronger than in 2016?
He gets there with his close entourage, which was less the case in 2016. But this circle is probably not sufficiently extensive to constitute an entire administration. It will therefore necessarily be necessary to expand it. Furthermore, in any democracy, a head of state needs to be surrounded by people who understand how institutions work, who know how laws are made, how bills are adopted and how regulations are written. He will therefore not be able to just do what he wants.
The authorities had prepared for riots on election night. So far, no major incidents have occurred. Does this mean that the specter of a civil war that some are raising is still far away?
The question we must ask ourselves is: Would this election night have been as calm if the Democratic Party had won? I don’t think the answer is obvious. We must also take into account the fact that in 2020, the violence occurred during the inauguration and not during the election. Although there are still a few months until the transfer of power, the likelihood of riots similar to those in 2020 occurring is very low, largely because Donald Trump did not lose.
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