The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

“WE wuz robbed!”

It’s an old, time-tested lament from a losing team as its members complain about an officiating error that provided just that extra oomph to get their opponent across the finish line. There is a clear implication that under normal circumstances, the complainant’s team would have prevailed.

If you like to watch Fox News or One America News Network - the upstart wannabe successor as Trump’s favoured network - it certainly seems plausible that Donald Trump wuz indeed robbed in his re-election effort.

Many of these networks’ shows are full of tales of sinister Venezuelan connections to voting machine manufacturers; hundreds or even thousands of mysteriously missing ballots, and allegations of malfeasance by local Democratic or even RINO (Republican in Name Only) GOP officials.

The liberal punditocracy, meanwhile, wrings its hands in anguish that 73 million American voters could have voted for Trump. What fools or innocents they must be!

The harrumphing, posturing, blathering and scorn for those who disagree continues in the media.

But the election is actually over and Joe Biden is the President-elect. Even the Trump-appointed head of the General Services Administration in Washington has finally signed off on making funds, office space and other privileges available to Biden and his massive transition team.

Ever the iconoclastic norm-defying renegade, Trump still declares he will never concede. And sure enough, there is nothing in the American constitution that covers such a circumstance. Jeffrey Engel, the director of the Centre for Presidential History in Dallas told the Washington Post why this is so.

“The founding fathers couldn’t fathom two things: a person who was so utterly lacking in classical virtue that they would put their own interests above those of the country,” Engel said. “And second, I think they couldn’t imagine how any President who would so vividly display disdain for the unity of the country, and mock and undermine the legitimacy of American democracy. And if a President did that, why wouldn’t that person have already been impeached and removed from office?”

Well, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats did try.

Welcome to the first (and only?) term of Donald J Trump, widely reviled to be sure but also the recipient of the second largest total vote in American political history. In fact, Trump won ten million more votes than he captured four years ago - and yet he lost the general election by six million votes!

Trump’s Republican Party also defied pollsters’ predictions in probably retaining control of the US Senate pending two Georgia run-off votes set for January 5, gaining at least ten seats in the Democratic controlled House of Representatives, and achieving control of an additional two state legislative chambers to build on an already impressive majority there.

Normally in an election when an incumbent President is defeated, there are major down-ballot consequences.

Not this time. Researchers have found the turnover in control of state legislative chambers was less than at any time since 1944.

There was certainly no blue wave.

It was actually a pretty good election for Republicans, despite the fact their sitting President got beaten decisively.

Why? There seem to be four major reasons.

Perhaps the most important is many of the 79 million Biden voters were singularly focused on dismissing Trump from the White House. Everything else paled in comparison. The American President has dominated the headlines, the “breaking news” and the political discussion since he declared his presidential candidacy five years ago.

He has managed to remain at the centre of American political discourse. But his opponents’ focus on him to the relative exclusion of other candidates was not the only reason for down-ballot Republican success.

“It’s all about the economy, stupid!” became a rallying cry in 1992, the last time a sitting US President was denied a second term by voters.

It’s still all about the economy and according to exit polls, 35 percent of US voters said this was the biggest issue this year for them. (More about the polls later.)

Of those voters, five out of six chose Trump. It seems Americans may have longer recall than many pundits believe, because the roaring US economy of just one year ago is still fresh in many minds. Winning nearly 85 percent of any identifiable bloc of voters is a phenomenal achievement by any measure.

Another pivotal issue in 2020 was immigration. It appears this issue, more than any other, really caught the Democrats asleep.

Remember 2016? Trump was trumpeting the imminent danger of brown hordes of Mexican and Central Americans pouring across the southern American border, among them rapists, murderers, drug traffickers and most anything else you can imagine.

Many observers and many Democrats assumed this sort of racist venom would turn off Latinos and ensure their support for whomever opposed Trump.

This proved to be incorrect, for two reasons. First, as most people including even Democratic leaders have now realised, Latinos are not a monolithic bloc of American voters. While Hispanic voters largely stayed loyal to Democrats in California and elsewhere in the American southwest, particularly in cities, Trump garnered 200,000 more votes in Miami-Dade County than he had won in 2016.

Also, Trump’s stump speeches this year no longer featured hyperbolic rants about Latin immigrants. He focused more on the socialist menace and law and order issues that were likely to attract actual or spiritual refugees from left-wing dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela.

Speaking of which, the fourth and last major reason for GOP down ballot success was messaging. For this, we turn to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and the Black Lives Matter movement.

New York City congresswoman AOC, her progressive colleagues in the House of Representatives and Vermont Senator Sanders have all described themselves or many of their signature policies as socialist.

They’re proud of that. They realize that in a diverse and disparate nation with a third of a billion people, some state control and distribution of benefits such as national insurance and health care are necessary for the maintenance of the public good.

But to clever Republican demagogues like Trump, this affinity for socialist policies provides a durable, credible applause and attack line. They have exploited it brilliantly, not just in the election just past but for over half a century.

And as has sometimes been the case in the US and democracies in both hemispheres, those who would most directly benefit from socialistic benefits programmes become the most virulent critics of those programmes and their sponsors.

While a clear majority of Americans appears to believe pernicious racism continues to be a real threat to American society, the ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement and the occasionally violent reaction across the country to the death in May of George Floyd while under police control has spawned a negative backlash reaction.

Trump was probably too late in picking up the law and order banner from Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and others, but it clearly won him some supporters who were alarmed at televised images of looting and clashes with police.

POLLS GET IT WRONG AGAIN - BUT WHAT ARE THE REASONS?

FOR the second straight general election, polls misled planners and Democratic strategists. Veteran pollster David Hill offered some reasons why in the aftermath of this month’s elections.

He wrote in the Washington Post that 35 years ago, he could expect one in five voters to permit an interview to offer opinions.

As he and associates gauged voter views earlier this year in Florida, Hill found that it took 90 or more phone calls, emails or other contacts to generate one person from a representative voter sample willing to be interviewed.

The introduction of caller ID in the mid-1980s was a factor, Hill reports. Voicemail and answering machines were others. Voters screen their calls now, and their willingness to participate in opinion sampling has reportedly dwindled every year.

Hill also said many “likely Trump voters” such as older men were especially reluctant to respond to his calls.

To ensure their own survival, pollsters need to find better ways to sample public opinion. Polls have significantly influenced how political parties allot the many, many millions of dollars they raise to support their candidates.

Alternatively, what if those dollars were spent on reducing poverty, elevating education, buttressing infrastructure or leading the way against climate change?

One can always dream.

Meantime, Happy Thanksgiving!