It has been called the most important election in the lives of Americans. It is, and it has already stretched over three agonising days now. If it were a ‘normal’ election, the kind that seemed to demonstrate America’s democratic credentials every four years through a peaceful transition of power, we would have known, more or less, on election night itself who was on the path to the White House. This, of course, is not a normal election. It could even be weeks, and violence and court battles, before the final word is said on who will be the next President – Donald Trump again or Joe Biden -- as a seesaw counting battle rages on in a handful of battleground states. The uncertainty is partly due to the Electoral College system. In America, a candidate does not become President by winning the popular vote, as Joe Biden is on track to doing, but by winning at least 270 out of 538 Electoral College votes. These Electoral College votes are distributed among the states, and it matters which states and how many of them candidates win in the popular vote. A few states emerge as battleground states, where the candidates fight for the votes of the undecided in each election. Biden is short of the 270 mark by one or two such battleground states, Trump far shorter of it. And the counting process in these states is going slow.
But the biggest reason for the uncertainty is that Trump has done as well as he has, even after presiding over the deaths of nearly 240,000 Americans due to Covid-19. Clearly, Trump’s large following among White, non-college educated voters remains loyal to him. He has also managed to get other groups on his side – such as Latino immigrants in Florida and undecided White voters elsewhere -- by playing on their fears: the fear of Communism if Biden wins; the fear of Biden handing over the presidency midway to his running mate Kamala Harris, and the like. It is ominous. No matter what the election result, Trumpism is here to stay in America.
This America is split into White and Black, coastal America and middle America. Trump has widened another divide -- that between the big cities, which are predominantly Democrat, and rural and small-town America, which has plumped for him. Biden has multiple pathways to the presidency. Trump still has one or two ways to it. But America has only one pathway out of these divisions. It needs a unifier who can rally them all together. They call it the battle for the soul of America, and a battle for the soul is never easy, especially when it is in the grip of the devil of misinformation and conspiracy theories.