Observers in Britain of events in the United States may well be misled by the feeling of a ‘special relationship’ with the republic ‘across the pond’. What we know of the USA tends to be based on the two extremes, New York on the east coast and San Francisco on the west, filtered perhaps by Westerns and TV series, but most of the territory is, as they say, ‘fly-over country’, mentally as well as physically. To take a trivial example, the political colours in the USA are the other way round: there left is blue and right is red.
As I write, in mid-November, the vote count is still unfinished, but Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by five million votes and has won more than the required 270 votes in the electoral college. The various challenges to the count mounted or threatened by the man Boris Johnson has described as ‘the previous president’ are regarded by most experts as unlikely to succeed, which leaves everything in place for Joe Biden to be inaugurated as the 246th President of the United States on 20 January 2021.
So how did Biden and his team-mate, vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, do it? No-one uses the terms ‘exciting’ or ‘charismatic’ of Biden, and that seeming disadvantage probably goes a long way to explain his success: at the age of 77 and with several decades of experience in Washington politics, he could be presented as a safe pair of hands. Harris played along with this image, though she is a much more striking personality, the first woman in the role, and the first woman of black and South Asian heritage. As a former attorney general of California, she will have helped to neutralise Trump’s insistence that only Republicans could be trusted to maintain ‘law and order’.
Did Covid-19 win the election for the Democrats? There is a strong case for this, since it is the one issue on which Biden clearly sought to differentiate himself from Trump. It is also the issue on which he has taken the most decisive action since the election, with his appointment of a 13-member panel of experts to advise him. Biden has also said he will take the US back into the Paris agreement to combat climate change. Domestically, he wants to fund universal pre-kindergarten provision, enhanced Social Security benefits and expanded tax credits for health insurance coverage. He would double the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and make it easier for workers to form trade unions. His scope for action may, however, be limited unless the Democrats win two run-off Senate elections scheduled for January.
The situation of the Senate illustrates the limited nature of the Democrat victory. While they have won the presidency, they have not won back control in the upper house and have lost seats in the House of Representatives. The result looks more like a vote against Trump than a vote for the Democrats. Many commentators have stressed that if Trump has been defeated, ‘trumpism’ is still strong, especially in rural areas. Remarkably, the Republicans increased their vote among black men. The Democrats, in contrast, were over-confident about the Latino vote. This was illustrated most spectacularly in Miami where conservatives succeeded in portraying the Democrats as socialists, to the horror of Cuban Americans. One group of Latinos the Democrats ignored, was Latino evangelicals, the fastest growing group among Latinos.
Religion played a role in the election, but less so than race. Among white Catholics, 57% backed Trump and 42% backed Biden, according to a VoteCast survey. Among Hispanic Catholics, VoteCast reports that 67% backed Biden and 32% backed Trump. In contrast, one political scientist described white Evangelicals as ‘as red as red can get’. Among Jewish voters – 3% of the electorate – 68% backed Biden and 31% Trump. 64% of Muslim voters supported Biden while 35% supported Trump. Among voters with no religious affiliation, Biden took 72% while Trump took 26%.
No revolution then, but a victory for civility and sanity: tweets from the White House will no longer lead the news. But Biden and Harris have an immense task if they are to fulfil Biden’s pledge to unify a divided country.
Francis McDonagh has worked for two leading Catholic development agencies, translates for the international theological journal Concilium, and is an occasional contributor to the Tablet.