David Wasserman: "If Biden wins, the task of uniting the country will be extremely difficult"
Because of the candidates, the national context of maximum polarisation, the international context of global crisis and deep recession and the events of recent weeks, the November 3 elections in the United States are presented as the most atypical in recent decades.
Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden are running for election which, beyond the debate generated around the management of COVID-19 and its impact on the country's economy, harbours many sources of tension that could affect the outcome of the election, including the problem of structural racism and police violence, the issue of immigration and the environmental alarm following the devastating fires that have severely affected several West Coast states.
To clarify and understand this scenario, the Alternativas Foundation and the Consejo España-EEUU Foundation organised the seminar "US Election 2020 : Perspectives and the Democrats' Agenda", which was attended by David Wasserman, editor of the Cook Political Report, and Roger Hickey, activist and co-director of the Institute for America's Future. Presented by Manuel Lejarreta, Secretary General of the Consejo España-EEUU Foundation, and moderated by Vicente Palacio, Director of Foreign Policy of the Alternativas Foundation, the debate revealed the keys to the campaign, through surveys and electoral trends, the debates in which the candidates for vice president, Kamala Harris and Mike Pence, participated this Wednesday, and the democratic agenda as an alternative to the current Republican administration.
"Four years ago, we all thought Trump was finished, but he took the White House even without a majority vote and lost two points nationally. It looks like there may be some surprises in October," Wasserman said.
In 2016 in the final weeks before the election, news about Trump and his sexist comments entered the campaign, but that didn't cause him to lose the election. In 2016, Trump ran as a "grenade against the political establishment, but now he has a record behind him, and not a very positive one," Hickey said. The activist considers that the social mobilisations of recent months have been crucial, motivated above all by the Republican President's disastrous handling of the pandemic, as well as the "Black Lives Matter" issue and the fight for the environment.
Today, "Biden is giving a course to let his opponent self-destruct and the president needs a miraculous comeback to win the election," says Hickey.
Biden's strategy has been not to take unnecessary risks. "Even his performance in the debates wasn't perfect, but that doesn't matter. Trump's behaviour after his hospital stay because of the positive COVID-19 reminded voters why they don't like him," suggests Wasserman.
According to both speakers, the Democratic Party's programme for these elections is very clear and unified around a programme of investing in economic growth and tackling the environmental crisis. The communion that we saw at the Democratic convention, with the same roadmap between those who supported the most left-wing wing of the party, personified by Bernie Sanders, and the more moderate ones, who came out victorious with Joe Biden. The common goal is to get Trump out of the White House and continue the gradual reconstruction of the country.
"If Biden wins, the task of uniting the country will be extremely difficult," notes Cook Political's US House Editor and warns that Trump will reject the legitimacy of the results if he is defeated.
With less than four weeks to go before the election, the country is highly polarized, with the debate over electoral fraud, ignited by Trump, at the centre of much of the Republican discourse, and COVID-19 remains the main topic for Democrats.
