Why does the US reject a presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump?

“This is probably the most singularly horrible election I have ever had in my life,” he told the agency a few days ago. Associated Press Andrew Collins, 35 years old, from Windham (Maine) registered as an independent voter, on the presidential campaign that begins between the president Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, and that will last until the vote of the November 5th.

“I think it's sad for our country that those are our best options,” said Randy Johnson, a 64-year-old Republican from Missouri. “We are reduced to choosing the lesser of two evils.”

(Read also: Donald Trump: appeals court judges, skeptical of the request for immunity).

According to a poll by the Associated Press and the Center for Public Affairs Research, 56 percent of voters are dissatisfied with seeing Biden seek re-election, while 58 percent are happy to see former President Trump as the Republican candidate. Neither of them has a majority favorable opinion. Biden starts the year with only 42 percent of opinions in favorwhile Trump adds even less: 36 percent.

Despite having fewer positive opinions among Americans as a whole, Trump has a slight advantage over Biden in voting intention. According to the average of polls updated daily by the Real Clear Politics portal, the former president scores 46.5 percent against 44.3 percent for the current president.

Trump is ahead in five of six critical states, whose delegates to the Electoral College are definitive when it comes to anointing the winner in a country that – it is good to remember – does not choose the president by direct vote but by virtue of the delegates that each state elects. , based on the popular vote.

Each of the 50 states has a defined number of delegates and, in principle, in the vast majority of states, all of their delegates Electora CollegeThey must vote for the candidate who has won the popular vote in that state.

According to a Siena College poll, Trump would prevail today with relative comfort in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump would thus keep all the electoral votes in those areas, while Biden would win only in Wisconsin, and by a very small difference (47 percent against 45 percent).

Each one with entanglements

The biggest problem is Joe Biden with young people, who widely supported him in 2020, then obtaining a 20 percentage point advantage over Trump in the 18- to 29-year-old group of voters. According to the Siena College survey, that age group now seems to lean toward Trump.

Many young Democrats and independents who supported Biden have abandoned him, some because they see him as too old (he is 81 years old), others because they see him as too center and would like him a little more to the left, and others because they reject the support of the White House to Israel, in the war that Tel Aviv troops are waging against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

But Trump doesn't have it easy either, although his troubles are more with the law than with the voters. There are 91 criminal accusations against the former president in half a dozen processes, ranging from sexual abuse and fraud to fraudulent maneuvers to overturn the election he lost to Biden in 2020, including his support for the mob that violently assaulted the Capitol three years ago. years.

Colorado and Maine prevented the registration of Trump's name on the Republican primary ballots, based on a paragraph of the 14th amendment of the Constitution that prohibits those who have been linked to acts of insurrection from being appointed or elected to public office. And insurrection is the word that several prosecutors, judges and magistrates use to describe the assault on the Capitol by Trumpists, on January 6, 2021, supported by the then president.

Trump's fate is in the hands of the Supreme Court. There are at least three cases that have already reached the highest judicial instance of the USA. The first has to do with the immunity that Trump claims to have, among other things, because when the assault on the Capitol occurred, he was still occupying the White House and, according to the argument of his lawyers, Congress should prosecute him for those events, which He has already refrained from prosecuting it.

Two other decisions have to do with the vetoes in Colorado and Maine to his candidacy in the primaries. Trump's lawyers have appealed both the decision of the Colorado State Supreme Court and the one adopted, in the same sense, by the Secretary of State of Maine, Shenna Bellows. And since there are similar lawsuits in a dozen other states, it is very likely that those cases will also reach the Supreme Court.

The argument for vetoing Trump's registration is based on the aforementioned constitutional rule, designed in the years following the civil war that took place between 1861 and 1865. With that rule, the victors of the Union (from the northern states ) sought to ensure that the defeated of the Confederacy (from the southern states) could not reach, by appointment or election, public positions, since these leaders had participated in the southern insurrection against the government of President Abraham Lincoln, which caused the civil war.

The Supreme Court has a majority of six conservative justices against three progressive ones. And among the six conservatives, three were nominated by Trump when he was president. With that in mind, many analysts are betting on a favorable decision for Trump in the highest court.

But there are other considerations. Following several scandals involving some of the justices, for receiving favors and gifts from private businessmen – some close to Trump – and the rejection by broad sectors of rulings such as the one that made it possible for state courts to prohibit abortion, the Supreme Court faces a credibility crisis.

After decades of having the trust of the majority of Americans, that indicator has fallen. A Gallup poll that measures the trustworthiness of institutions among the public each summer showed that trust in the Supreme Court, which was 50 percent of respondents in 2002, had fallen to 40 percent by 2020. Between 2021 and 2023, the collapse continued: from 36 to 27 percent.

That is why there are those who think that, despite the conservative majority, nothing is defined. “The Court's rulings could be decisive for the presidential election in a way we have never seen before,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, told Politico.com.

“But also – adds the dean – they will impact how the Court is perceived.” Everything will begin to become clear after February 8, when the parties present their final arguments before the nine justices of the highest court, in Washington DC. By then, the primary votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada will have taken place, but 46 more will be missing.

Polarization

While on social networks the campaign of mutual attacks and personal disqualifications started with singular ferocity, the tone of the speeches already announces that, if there are no changes in the ballots of the two major parties, the electoral year will be marked by aggressiveness .

“Whether democracy remains America's sacred cause is the most pressing issue of our time, and the challenge of the 2024 election,” Biden said Friday in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in his first campaign speech. “By trying to rewrite the events of January 6 (2021), Trump is trying to steal history in the same way he tried to steal the election,” the president said.

“But we know the truth because we saw it with our eyes on television,” he added before finishing: “Trump's riot was not a peaceful demonstration, they were violent assailants, they were insurgents, not patriots, they were not there to enforce the Constitution but to destroy it.”

Trump has gone even further: “We are a nation that is failing (…), a banana republic of corrupt Joe Biden,” he said at an event in Kissimmee, south of Orlando, Florida, a few weeks ago. And since then he has repeated the concepts of “banana republic” and “corrupt Biden” dozens of times.

In addition to attacking Trump for his support of the Capitol attackers, Biden will have to make an effort to make voters see that the economic results of his administration are not bad at all, as confirmed by the fact that he has kept unemployment below 4 percent since 2021. In December, the economy created 200,000 new Job positions.

Something similar happens with insecurity figures. According to the firm AH Datalytics, homicides fell by 13 percent in 2023, one of the largest declines of the century. For Biden, it will not be easy to position these achievements, since the effectiveness of the Trumpists' handling of fake news is well known and with it they will seek to deny it.

Even so, the polls show that, during December, Biden registered a slight improvement: at the beginning of the month, Trump was up by up to six percentage points, and now the difference has been reduced and is in the range of a technical tie.

The race is just beginning and it is not even clear if Biden and Trump will be candidates. Aside from the legal risks of the former president's aspiration, Biden himself recently said that he is in the race because Trump ran, which suggests that if Trump were not there, he would step aside. Ten months before the vote, not even that is defined, and the only thing clear is that as long as they are the candidates, the campaign will be to the death.

MAURICIO VARGAS LINARES
ANALYST
TIME