Democrats have stopped believing in opinion polls. There is nervousness, perhaps even panic, from their media and comments on social networks. There is clearly something wrong with Pennsylvania, a state in the northeastern United States about the size of the former Czechoslovakia. Surveys say Joe Biden is almost five percent ahead of Donald Trump. But the energy on the spot is obviously different.
“When I drive around, Trump’s support is truly breathtaking. Signs with his name are simply everywhere, “she described for Financial Times mood in the western, conservative part of Pennsylvania political scientist Kristen Coopie of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Laura Schisler, who elects Republicans and lives in the suburbs of the same city, says in the same report that the energy of Trump’s followers “is simply unbelievable. Four years ago, everyone was afraid to say out loud that they would elect him. Today, people walk down the street in the big masks of Trump. “
Democrats are consoling. “Sure, victory is estimated by the number of signs on the lawn,” one of Joe Biden’s followers commented ironically on the images over Twitter over the weekend. Uncertainty is still tangible. “If we lose Pennsylvania, we lose the whole country,” the server headline hummed Politico. “Democrats are increasingly concerned about Pennsylvania,” he said The Washington Post.
Both candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have been driving through Pennsylvania in the last hours before the election. The incumbent has previously sent his own wife, daughter and favorite South Carolina governor Nikka Haley to roar women in the Pennsylvania suburbs. Women in the suburbs don’t like Trump as much as men in mining areas in the southwest of the state. Any of them can decide – four years ago, Hillary Clinton lost in Pennsylvania by less than one percent, or about 40,000 votes.
And a similar difference can determine the outcome of the entire US election. In this case, less than one-percent of the voters in one of the fifty countries will be transformed into twenty-one voters, which Pennsylvania will then award to one of the candidates – the winner takes it all. Twenty voters correspond to the twenty representatives, senators and congressmen that the state sends to the US Congress. The weight of the voice in Pennsylvania is so different – greater than, for example, the weight of the voice in California, which also sends two senators, and is almost four times as large. The result can be a significant disproportion: four years ago, Hilary Clinton won a total of 2.9 million votes in the United States, but thanks to the distribution of voters, the electoral majority met for Donald Trump. He is thus a minority president – he rules, although he did not actually win over most Americans.
It’s alright? In any case, it is legal and strictly under the US Constitution. It sees the focus of American democracy in individual states, and does not even tell them how to choose voters. For example, the state of Maine does not follow the principle that the winner takes everything and distributes the majority of voters according to the results in individual constituencies. The disproportionate distribution of Democrat and Republican voters is then the result of spontaneous demographic change: Democrats are simply concentrated in cities and coastal states, Republicans in small towns, in the countryside and inland.
Respect 45/2020: The last turn before autocracy
However, it is these states that are favored in the constitution: although they are much less populated, they are all assigned the same number of senators, which in turn is reflected in the number of voters. In short, US elections are not entirely “fair” – for example, Republican senators basically represent significantly less voters than Democrat senators. And because senators also confirm constitutional judges, conservative judges are de facto representatives of the American minority.
The whole system makes sense as an occasional balancing tool of changing attitudes in the country, but something unhealthy has been happening lately. Yes, in the 1980s, the president won the electorate, even though he did not win the votes of the majority of Americans. The same thing happened more than a hundred years later, in 2000. However, George W. Bush was aware of the problem, as he writes. in the new edition of Respekt David Frum, author of his speeches, said: “Bush saw this as a huge political problem. When the Supreme Court ruled in his favor on December 13, 2000, he promised to rule amicably and supranationally. “
Bush also won “regularly” four years later, with the support of the majority, and another president, Barack Obama, had no problem with legitimacy. Donald Trump is a completely different chapter. As has already been said, four years ago he won by losing almost three million votes. He came to terms with the never-proven claim that millions of voters actually voted illegally. His support during his four years in office never reached 50 percent, and his electoral strategy was never to gain an American center and become a majority president.
If there was a real surprise in this year’s election, it would be Trump’s majority. That would really be a political earthquake. However, most projections say that if it wins, it will happen in the same way as before, thanks to the above-average representation of its typical voters in key states whose weight is decisive. In such a case, Trump will deliberately become a minority president, a representative of a dwindling group of voters, who, however, can use an age-old, two hundred and fifty-year-old system to the extreme.
What would follow in such a case is in the stars. How long will the majority be willing to accept that the election does not reflect real representation? What steps will the minority have to take to maintain its position? In the US elections, for example, there is a frequent attempt to actively complicate voters from participating in elections – something we cannot imagine in the Czech Republic.
Donald Trump certainly didn’t invent this trick, but he definitely uses it. In Pennsylvania, Republicans, for example trying to achieve to avoid counting votes received by correspondence after the election date. However, votes can be sent until that date. If the case goes to the Constitutional Court again, it will be decided by a body in which the Conservatives now have a majority. And, as we have seen, he fights for every voice.
Read also: A bigger problem than four years of Trump’s rule is the defeat of the Republican Party
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