Its D-Day in the United States as voters cast their ballots to decide whether Donald Trump remains in the White House for another four years or his challenger, former Vice- President Joe Biden, will take over from him. WALE ELEGBEDE reports
After months of bitter campaigns and intriguing politicking, the highly anticipated day for the United States Presidential Election 2020 is here. Tensions are high and turnout for the poll could be historic given the huge interest from the electorate, but the results could be slow in coming in.
Americans vote every four years in early November for their next president and vice president. Although there are other political parties, the two dominant parties in the U.S, are the Democrats and the Republicans. It has been over 150 years since any other party outside the Democrats and the Republicans won the presidency but other parties like the Green Party and Libertarians, may have enough support to get their nominees on the ballot in some or all states.
In the 2020 race, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are seeking reelection for another fouryear term on the Republican platform,, while their main challengers on the Democratic side are former Vice President Joe Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris (a current senator).
Donald Trump
With no prior government or military experience before becoming the 45th president of the United States in January 2017, Trump was the oldest presidential candidate ever to be elected at age 70. He was a wealthy New York businessman, a TV reality show host and real estate developer before his emergence as president.
He created a different style of communication as president by taking his message directly to the public through social media instead of granting interviews to journalists or holding news conferences, with Twitter serving as his favorite platform. As occupant of the White House for the past four years, Trump has attract=ed fierce loyalty from his supporters and also energised his opponents in equal measure.
When he and first lady Melania Trump and son Barron moved to Washington in 2017, 11-year-old Barron became the first boy to live in the White House in more than 50 years.
The president also has four adult children from two previous marriages. Highlighting the essence of his second term bid, Trump said: “Considering that we have done more than any administration in the first two years, this should be easy; more great things now in the works!”
One of his major legislative accomplishment as president was a sweeping tax cut that chiefly benefited corporations and wealthy investors. His signature issues revolves around restriction on immigration, renegotiating or canceling international deals on trade, arms control and climate change; withdrawing American troops from overseas, among others.
Joe Biden
Biden is a strong speaker and debater. Before now, he had run for president twice before becoming President Barack Obama’s vice president. A few days before leaving office, Obama awarded Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
He was a senator for 36 years and vice president for eight years, but he nearly had his political career disrupted a few weeks after his first Senate election in 1972, when his wife and one year-old daughter died in a car accident.
His two young sons were badly injured in the accident. As a widowed, single dad, he mulled giving up his Senate seat as the representative of Delaware and stay at home with his sons. But he felt otherwise and chose to commute daily by train from Delaware to the nation’s capital, 90 minutes each way, and be at home with his sons during mornings and evenings.
He remarried in 1977 but train trips continued. He and his wife, Jill, a teacher, had a daughter. After Biden was elected vice president in 2008, the couple moved into the official residence of the vice president in Washington.
Having ridden more than two million miles on the nation’s Amtrak train lines, he was given the nickname “Amtrak Joe.” Speaking on why he threw his hat into the ring for the presidency, Biden, said: “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Biden is known for his down-toearth personality and his prowess to connect with working-class voters. Expectedly, his eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president is a major selling point for many Democrats.
His major talking point include, restoring America’s standing on the global stage; adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act; strengthening economic protections for lowincome workers in industries like manufacturing and fast food, among others.
The surge in early voters
Concerns about possible exposure to Coronavirus at busy Election Day voting places today, have pushed up the numbers of people voting by mail or at early in-person polling sites.
A record 90 million Americans have voted early in the presidential election, data over the weekend showed. The high number of early voters, about 65 per cent of the total turnout in 2016, reflects intense interest in the contest.
Clearly, an election system tweaked for the pandemic meets an electorate that doesn’t want to wait till today to be heard.
Poll positions
National polls are good guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, but they’re not necessarily a good way to predict the result of the election. In the last presidential election in 2016, Hillary Clinton led in the polls and won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump, but she still lost.
That’s because the U.S. uses an Electoral College system, so winning the most votes doesn’t always win one the election. Biden continues to hold the lead among likely voters nationally, according to a Fox News poll released on Friday.
He has a 52-44 per cent advantage over Trump, although that is down two points from a poll few weeks earlier. Biden leads among independent voters with 54 per cent support compared to Trump’s 32 per cent.
Trump won independents by four points over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to exit polls. Biden also has a significant advantage when it comes to favourability. The poll says 55 per cent of voters view him favourably compared with 44 per cent for Trump.
Forty-six per cent of respondents say they approve of the job Trump has done as president, but of the 54 per cent who disapprove, almost half – 46 per cent – strongly disapprove of his job performance. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
Dynamics of battleground, swing states
Describing what swing states or battleground states are, Jon McHenry, Vice President of the Republican Polling and Strategy Firm in North Star Opinion Research, said they are states that flipped sides in the previous election, as well as those where the victory margin was 5 percentage points or less.
McHenry, who spoke as briefer alongside Margie Omero, a Principal at the Democratic Polling Firm, GBAO, at the Elections 2020: Virtual Reporting Tour of the Foreign Press Center for the November 3 election, said since 2000, only 13 of the 50 US states have voted for both Democratic or Republican parties.
“Battleground” or “swing” states, which can switch back and forth between the two major parties in U.S. presidential votes and are heavily courted by candidates, will be crucial to deciding the winner of this year’s election. While stating that a referendum on the President is a key topic influencing the voters in those crucial states, the pollsters listed the more than a dozen swing states based on demography, past and recent election history, voter registration and other related factors.
According to the Republican pollster, the states to consider as a battleground in the 2020 presidential race are the states that flipped in 2016 such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, just as he added in the list Florida and Iowa that had voted for President Obama in 2012 and voted for President Trump in 2016. He also named any state that has decided by five points or fewer as critical to the tight presidential race, namely, Arizona and Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Maine, and North Carolina.
McHenry also said President Trump needs to win Florida plus one more of the key battleground states in order to be re-elected, just as he crucially drew attention to the importance of senior voters in the competitive states. Interestingly, out of all the battleground states, the most important is Florida.
The state has the most number of electors among the swing states — 29 — due to its larger population in the 2010 census, which is used to determine how many presidential electors each state has. In 2016, Florida voted for Trump by a slim margin of 1.2 percentage points. Of significant among the factors that may influence how Florida votes is who the senior voters are disposed to at this period. Senior citizens are integral demographic in the state because Florida is a favoured retirement state for Americans.
Electoral College
Speaking at the Virtual Reporting Tour of the Foreign Press Center for journalists, a renowned expert on the U.S. Federal Government system, the Presidency, Politics and Elections, Dr. Mark J. Rozell, said the US doesn’t have a national popular vote for the presidency but a state-by-state, winnertakes- all system where each state is assigned a number of electors.
Stating that the Electoral College has 538 votes and a candidate must get 270 votes in order to win the election, he stressed that electors are part of a larger national body called the Electoral College and they are chosen by the parties but the process differs from state to state.
He explained further that “there are 538 electors at the Electoral College, 270 is the magic number, the candidate who gets 270 or more becomes president of the United States,” adding that the number of electors for each state is the total of the number of representatives in the House of Representatives, the lower house, plus the two senators in the upper house.
He also explained the rationale behind the election of House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate every two years and why the President is elected once every four years, adding that in this 2020 election cycle, the President, members the House of Representatives and one-third of members of the Senate will be elected.
Issues around the poll
In its election spotlights, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) presented a guide on the positions of the presidential candidate on global issues owing to the strategic role of the US in global affairs. US-China relationship One major issue in the 2020 race is the increasingly confrontational U.S.- China relationship which has aroused international concern.
The issue has been exacerbated by the pandemic of the new coronavirus disease, COVID- 19, that originated from China. The US has been making effort to integrate China into global institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the hope that China, now one of the world’s two largest economies, would fully accept the prevailing international order, but that has proved difficult.
Trump’s position on China has been to confront China over what he says is a suite of economic abuses: intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, export subsidies, and economic espionage. He says aggressive action is required to protect American workers and to reduce the United States’ large bilateral trade deficit, and that the coronavirus crisis demonstrates the need to hold China accountable.
On his part, Biden has framed China’s rise as a serious challenge. He has criticized its “abusive” trade practices– warning that it may pull ahead of the United States in new technologies– and its human rights record. He says he would mount a more effective pushback against China than Trump and work more closely with allies to pressure Beijing.
COVID-19 pandemic
The emergence of the novel coronavirus disease known as COVID-19 in early 2020 has led to sweeping social and economic changes around the world as governments grapple with how to contain the pandemic. It also appears to have fundamentally transformed the 2020 presidential race, highlighting candidates’ approaches to global health and federal leadership, challenging their ability to campaign, and upending the traditional nominating processes.
The repercussions for the United States have been dire, with over 9 million of confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 200,000 deaths already. All along, Trump has repeatedly downplayed the threat of the novel coronavirus disease and resisted directing a strong federal effort to defeat it. He initially said the spread of the virus was under control in the United States, despite receiving warnings of an impending pandemic from intelligence agencies and health officials beginning in January 2020.
Since March, Trump has overseen a patchwork national response, with some crucial measures delegated to state governors For Biden, he has put forward a national plan to address the pandemic of the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19.
He pledges to strengthen presidential leadership and spend “whatever it takes” to expand testing, contact tracing, treatment, and other health services; support the economy; and prepare for future pandemics. He criticizes Trump’s response as “political theater” and promises to return the United States to a position of global leadership on the crisis.
Diplomacy and foreign aid
In what can be termed as effortless move, the United States, since the end of World War II, has led diplomatic efforts to build alliances and institutions to promote peace and prosperity globally. In years, Washington has been among the chief architects of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as well as many other international institutions.
Of course, critics of these institutions have argued that they undermine U.S. sovereignty and others alleging they favor special interests. But there has generally been a consensus in Washington that this multilateral order has been a net positive, for both the United States and the world.
Trump has withdrawn the United States from international agreements and commitments that he feels are drain on the country’s resources. He also feuded with longtime allies on issues from defense to trade, and has criticized global institutions that he says force the United States to “surrender sovereignty.”
His budget proposals have sought to slash foreign aid and make it more conditional on support for U.S. policies. But Biden emphasizes that the United States cannot deal with the new challenges it faces without close relationships with its allies and the cooperation of international institutions. He says Trump’s withdrawal from treaties and his denigration of alliances has “bankrupted America’s word in the world.”
Economic policy
The healthiness of the United States’ economy would determine her ability to influence events on the foreign sphere, and many 2020 challengers argue that it is on shaky ground.
Despite low unemployment and a record period of economic expansion in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, economists worry about slowing growth, rising debt, and uncertainty over President Donald J. Trump’s trade war. Biden has positioned himself as a champion of the middle class, warning that decreasing economic opportunity and mobility is worsening the polarization and radicalization of American life. He proposes trillions of dollars in new federal spending on U.S. products, infrastructure, and research, arguing that “economic security is national security.”
On his part, Trump has emphasized tax cutting and deregulatory economic policies, which he says have spurred growth, innovation, and employment. The coronavirus pandemic cast the country into recession in 2020, while the budget deficit and national debt have risen amid unprecedented coronavirus-related spending.
Immigration
Immigration has been a flashpoint of the U.S. political debate for decades. Efforts at comprehensive immigration reform have repeatedly foundered in Congress due to disagreement over creating a path to citizenship for the estimated eleven million undocumented residents in the United States, many of whom are from Mexico and Central America.
For Trump, immigration is a signature issue and a major flash point between his administration and its Democratic challengers. Campaigning on a platform of sharply reducing both legal and illegal immigration, he has taken executive action to reshape asylum, deportation, and visa policy. Biden has condemned Trump’s approach to immigrants and asylum seekers, calling it “morally bankrupt” and “racist.”
He supports comprehensive immigration reform, and has in the past backed more restrictionist policies. He emphasizes the need to address the root causes of immigration in the countries of origin.
Issues on the ballot
Besides voting for the president and vice-president, the U.S. election is also a chance for myriad other issues to be put before the electorate — and not just in terms of Republican and Democratic policy proposals. In 32 states, there are roughly 120 issues on the ballot.
So, at the same time someone votes for president, they may also have a chance to vote on abortion, the legalization of drugs, new flags, electoral reform and other ballot measures, usually called propositions. For this election, the electors meet on December 14 to cast votes.
Both chambers of Congress will meet on January 6 to count the votes and name the winner. Governors will certify the results in their respective states and share the information with Congress.
