Voters in America will decide on 3 November whether Donald Trump remains in the White House for another four years. The Republican president is being challenged by Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden, who is best known as Barack Obama’s Vice-President but has been in US politics since the 1970s. As election day approaches, polling companies will be trying to gauge the mood of the nation by asking voters which candidate they prefer.
With less than two months until the 2020 elections, Americans are deeply unhappy with the state of the nation. As the United States simultaneously struggles with a pandemic, an economic recession and protests about police violence and racial justice, the share of the public saying they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country has plummeted from 31% in April, during the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, to just 12% today.
Anger and fear are widespread. Majorities of Democrats and Republicans say they feel both sentiments when thinking about the country, though these feelings are more prevalent among Democrats. The coronavirus pandemic has dominated headlines in the US since the start of the year and the response to President Trump’s actions has been split predictably along party lines. (It took 28 days to go from 2 million to 3 million.) Deaths are topped 1,100 for two days in a row, the first time that has happened since May. And more people are hospitalised for COVID-19 than at any time since the pandemic began.
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When Donald Trump came into office, there was a sense that he would be outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited.
The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as ‘the adults’ were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk. The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency.
Only in February this year, Mr Biden’s third run to become the Democratic White House nominee seemed on the verge of collapse. Then black voters in South Carolina’s primary rewarded him with a victory that made his candidacy seem all but inevitable virtually overnight.
Mr. Biden has faced questions about his age, he would be the oldest president ever elected. And his lengthy centrist record has come under heavy scrutiny in a party that has been gravitating leftwards. But he was able to rally the unruly progressive and moderate wings of his party to his banner by persuading Democratic voters that he has the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump. This would be determined come November when Americans would come out en-masse to exercise their franchise.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK
