I must confess that the results of yesterday's election in the USA came as a real shock. And I am very concerned about the potential impact of Trump's re-election for the entire planet.
I intend to make some suggestions that may allow us to take advantage of the situation to move things in the right direction.
However, in my first post following the re-election of Trump I would like to make a few simple points.
For 4 years, Trump has been claiming that the 2020 election was stolen. And he managed to get a large number of Republican politicians, Media outlets and supporters to follow him down that road. And we all saw the result on the 6th January 2021.
But if there is one good thing that came out of yesterday's election results, it is the conclusion that the electoral system based on citizens voting for their preferred candidates is fully functional and works well. Indeed, Trump was the clear winner, with over 50.9% of the votes - roughly 4.7 million more than Kamala Harris.
I took the latest numbers and put them in this table.
One important point is that, despite all the media coverage, voter turnout nationwide was only 65%, with large variations according to state.
According to the Washington Post the best turnouts were in Wisconsin (76.1%), Minnesota (75.5%), New Hampshire (74.8%), Maine (74%), Oregon (73.6%) and Michigan (73.5%), so well done to them. But even in some of the key battleground states, many people didn't vote. For example, turn out in Georgia (67.4%), Pennsylvania (69.4%), Nevada (67.5%), and Arizona (65.3%) were all not very impressive. I can imagine that the people in those states may have become thoroughly sick of being bombarded with hundreds of millions of dollars of ads everytime they turn on the radio or television. The worst turnouts were in staunchly Republican states like Oklahoma, Arkansas and West Virginia with turnout as low as a pathetic 50.5% in Mississippi In such places, it is likely that many would-be Democrat voters are not interested in voting because the Electoral College system makes their votes irrelevant.
Although I have long thought that scrapping the electoral college and basing the election directly on the popular vote would be very important, as proposed recently in an editorial in the Guardian, the fact is that this time Trump won fair and square.
The result of this voter apathy is that Trump has been elected president despite having less than one third of those eligible to vote supporting him. That's the way things work, unless you introduce compulsory voting as in Australia. Very good idea, in my humble opinion.
But this brings me to what I think should be a crusade. The Republican Politicians and media such as Fox News that promoted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen because the electoral system was "rigged" should admit that they were wrong, and apologise to the American people for spreading lies. Add to that the immense suffering inflicted on the election officials, including death threats, and they clearly have a lot to apologise for.
I think that the probability that Donald Trump could ever admit that he was wrong is extremely remote. I recently watched the excellent film "The Apprentice" that shows how Donald Trump was influenced by meeting lawyer Roy Cohn in 1973. Cohn told Trump the three rules of winning. Number one: attack, attack, attack. Number two: admit nothing and deny everything. And rule number three: no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.
Trump clearly never forgot those three rules. So there is little chance that he will ever admit that he lost in 2020, although he got very close gave that away when he said in an interview with Lex Fridman that "he lost by a whisker" but said later that he was being sarcastic. "Never admit defeat".
But I see no reason why all the establishment Republicans who went along with the Stolen Election story should not be forced to admit they were wrong.
Clearly, if there was any way for the Democrats to rig the election on the 5th November, they would have done it. But they couldn't, despite the enormous incentives they would have to do that.
The US election process is demonstrably solid, and the Republicans who spread the lie should be forced to admit it.
I'm not sure how they could be forced to own up. But maybe the millions of disappointed people in the US who have just accepted the result should petition the Republicans to acknowledge that they were clearly wrong, and apologise for all the trouble they caused. A web site called "Admit the Stolen Election story was a lie", maybe?
I have just posted a short video to make this point on Youtube. Feel free to share it!
https://youtu.be/YHl24mjiEuc?feature=shared
Update.
I just found the datasets provide by the excellent University of Florida's Election Lab, where you can find comprehensive data on voter turnout for all elections since 1789!
The data for the 2024 election is still preliminary, but you can find them state by state here.
It's fascinating. It reveals that the turnout of the voter eligible population was 64.5% (of which Donald Trump got 50.8% or 32.7%). However, this ignores the fact that in the USA, 2,591,130 citizens, i.e very nearly 1% of the population are prevented from voting because they are in prison, on probation or on parole. That percentage varies a lot from state to state. There are no such exclusions in Maine and Vermont, but reaches its maximum in Georgia where 3.5% are deprived of their right to vote. There are also 7.88% of the population who don't get to vote because they are not US citizens. So, if you include them to get the total voting age population, Trump's support drops to just 30.4% of the adult population. Oh well. That's just the way democracy's work.
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