From enchanting visual bouquets of the US’s ethnic diversity to heart-wrenching videos of speech-impaired or otherwise challenged individuals, the US Democratic National Convention last week reached out to every Black, Brown, Latina, islander, indigenous and other identity-specific person in every corner of the US Republic.
Across four days, its organisers orchestrated an inspiring, elevating, soul-stirring harmony of colours and voices. But they were preaching to the choir. And in doing so, seemed to have lost sight of their goal.
The Lessons of 2016
The big lesson of the 2016 elections, in which President Donald Trump coasted to power even though he got less votes overall than his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton, was to paraphrase the catch-line (it’s the economy, stupid!) of the 1992 elections, it’s the electoral college, stupid!
Trump won because he had the support of a substantially larger number in the electoral college than Clinton did. That college is formed by each US state sending an allotted number of delegates, proportional to its population. Most states are represented by delegates of whichever party wins the highest number of votes in that state.
State-Based Electoral System
In a version of the first-past-the-post system, whoever pulls in the largest number of votes within that state, even if it’s just half a percentage point more than the next candidate, gets all of that state’s delegates in the electoral college. A few states have minor variations on that system.
Most recent opinion polls have made it clear that the two major parties will need to concentrate on the dozen or so states that are often called battleground states. Most of the other states are already backing one or other candidate so strongly that it would be extremely unlikely for the other to turn the tide.
The Electoral College Battle Grounds
Poll watchers give particular weight to what happens in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Trump won all those six states in 2016 after the Democrat President Obama had won each of them in 2012 and 2008. New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, and Nevada are counted among other battleground states.
Some of these `battleground states’ are in relatively less ethnically diverse parts of the country.
Not only do many of these states have a higher proportion of those who identify as White than the national average, they have a larger proportion than the national average of White males without college degrees.
Surveys show that these demographic groups are more likely to vote for Trump than other groups.
Conversely, given Trump’s stances and performance on race-related matters, it is unlikely that most non-whites would vote for him. So, the rainbow variety of demographic groups, which the Democratic Convention repeatedly highlighted, was a stirring affirmation, but most non-whites—28 percent, not counting White Hispanics—are most likely already in the Democratic bag.
White Blue Collar Votes
If they want to win, the Democratic Party must focus on winning over the support of as many Whites as possible in the `battleground states,’ particularly working class White males. Broadly, these are more conservative populations than those on the eastern and western seaboards of the US.
If anything, the extraordinary focus on the inclusion of marginal and deprived groups may have alienated many White voters in these states that matter most. Many of them view other demographic groups as rivals in the job market.
Economic Focus
If they are to avoid the sort of patterns that defeated Clinton, Democrats ought to focus on issues that matter to voters in those states. Reviving the economy is even more crucial amid the economic bloodbath that the pandemic has caused than it has ever been. Apart from former president Bill Clinton, few speakers at the convention focused primarily on how a Democrat government would revive the economy.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren focused on it too, but their acknowledged Left-wing affiliations are unlikely to cut ice with the sort of right-of-centre voters the Democrats need to pull away from Trump, particularly in those `swing states.’
The ‘Black’ Kamala Harris
Biden chose to bolster the Democrats’ already strong support base among citizens of colour in the US population by picking Kamala Harris as his nominee for vice-president. Harris is an accomplished professional, a tough prosecutor, but the most obvious way in which people see her is that she identifies as Black, and is the proud daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India respectively.
Immigration is one of Trump’s (and his vote base’s) pet peeves, and he has played on the fears of his voter base that immigrants take their jobs or live off doles paid from their taxes. White supremacists are Trump’s most dedicated fanboys.
The pro-Democrat liberal media has been full of how well Harris’s nomination has been received among Democrats, and how much of a jump there was in campaign contributions in the two days after Biden named her.
This back-slapping enthusiasm took the left eye off the ball. They seemed to miss the fact that Biden’s lead over Trump in a variety of national opinion polls narrowed slightly in the days after he named her.
It is those little shifts that should dominate the mind-space of Democrat strategists if they want to win. For just a small shift in one or more of those `swing states’ could change the outcome in the electoral college. Arguably, a shift of just 0.01 percent of votes in an evenly poised state—say Texas, which could be a close contest this year—could shift an almost seven percent chunk of the electoral college from one candidate to the other.
(The writer is the author of ‘The Story of Kashmir’ and ‘The Generation of Rage in Kashmir’. He can be reached at @david_devadas. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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