‘Democracy is on the ballot in the United States. You better believe it.’
ONE week after Joe Biden became only the third US president since World War 2 to choose not to seek a second term, the campaign for the presidency is a dead heat.
A dead heat — after six months of polling where Biden never led Donald Trump even once.
Not even once.
This was in sharp contrast to 2020 when the reverse was true: poll after poll after poll showed Trump losing to Biden as soon as it was clear that they were to become each other’s party nominee.
The Democrats, while concerned with the polling before Biden’s dramatic pullout, were holding on two sources of hope: first was the debates, the first of which was to be held early, even before the party conventions had made their formal selections. Given his experience, Democrats were confident that Biden was going to make Trump look, well, stupid.
And then there were the conventions. Because the Democrats were holding their convention in August, half a month after the Republicans, they were holding on to the traditional bump that occurs in surveys following a party convention. Since the Republicans were to go first, the Democrats were banking on the usual trend that by the time they hold their convention the Republican polling numbers would have plateaued — and then they get their bump. In time for Memorial Day weekend in September and that mad rush to the polls on the first Tuesday of November.
But things started to go for the Democrats in a one-two punch that panicked the party.
First, Biden’s debate performance eclipsed the lies that Trump mouthed onstage, making him and not Trump the focus of post-debate analysis. And the analyses were all united in their negativity.
A week before the Republicans were to convene in Milwaukee, a young Republican took aim at Trump and nearly killed him. Trump, ever the showman, was able to turn the near-death experience into a major campaign issue — and he rode the public outrage into the convention and into polling numbers that became the last nails, so to speak, in the coffin of Biden’s presidential re-election bid.
Game over, people said.
Then Kamala.
Now, the shoe is on the other foot.
But there’s something far more important to me as a foreign observer than the fact that the race has become a dead heat or that the momentum seems to have shifted in a fashion so dramatic that all bets are off. What’s more important to me is the claim by those worried about Trump that democracy is on the line in America because Trump has time and again shown that he not only is sympathetic to dictators (many of them traditional “enemies” of the United States), he is also without qualms about acting dictatorial in a republic born out of a revolution against a tyrant and king.
Siccing a mob on the US Capitol on January 6, 2020 in order to prevent the certification of the results of peaceful elections was, to me, the ultimate disqualifier. No losing candidate for president has ever done that, especially a losing incumbent. But to Trump, it seemed just to come naturally.
As are his repeated claims that he will only lose if he is cheated and, if he loses, he won’t accept the results.
Democracy is on the ballot in the United States. You better believe it.
