Enigma of the US election

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JAMAL DOUMANI

arabnews

The results of the primary elections in New Hampshire — a state where if presidential candidates do not come out swinging and win big are likely to encounter diminished support elsewhere in the country — were no surprise.

As everybody and his uncle knows by now that Donald Trump, whose campaign has upended American politics, won resoundingly, leaving other presidential aspirants in the crowded Republican field, like Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush an Marco Rubio, reeling. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders won a decisive victory over Hillary Clinton, a victory that cemented the appeal of the septuagenarian’s insurgent message, and cast the former first lady, senator and secretary of state as old hat, part of an ossified old guard.

Sanders and Trump, both iconoclastic outsiders, are two figures who appear to be riding a populist wave that in recent years has washed ashore not only in the US but in the entire Euro-American world — the one an unrepentant “Democratic socialist” and the other a blustering billionaire mogul, both tapping into the discontent of two different but polarized segments in American society.

Sanders’ supporters, mostly young, liberal and independent, seek a new tense, as it were, in the grammar of their socioeconomic life — for who objects to a free college education, a crackdown on Wall Street excesses, an end to “tax breaks for the wealthy,” and a reconsideration of America’s putative role as the policeman of the world? Not since George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972, whose platform advocated, provocatively, withdrawal from the Vietnam war, amnesty for draft dodgers, a 37 percent reduction in defense spending and tax cuts for low income families, has there been anything like it. (Media pundits at the time did not think the senator from South Dakota had a chance of winning, proclaiming him “too decent” a man to win.)

Trump, on the other hand, is tapping into the nativist insecurities of a constituency of working-class, low-brow, middle-Americans fearful of its own shadow — fearful of migrants, fearful of Muslims, fearful of terrorism, fearful of the “other,” fearful of their future and fearful of how America, the Anglo-Saxon America of yore, is changing right before their eyes.

Nothing in American history — not the Alien Sedition Act of the 1790s, not the rabidly anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, not the red scare of the 1920s, not the excesses of McCarthyism of the 1950s — matches the menacing jingoism posed by this celebrity businessman turned politician. But in New Hampshire last Tuesday, the people spoke, and in a democracy when the people speak, by casting their ballots, we listen.

Yet, despite the traditional importance the state is assigned, as a barometer of America’s national mood, New Hampshire is not the be-all and end-all of the electoral process.

There is, beyond South Carolina and Nevada next week, Super Tuesday on March 1, a day when voters in well over a dozen states, all the way from Alabama to Wyoming and from Vermont to Alaska, go to the primaries and select delegates to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions (the former to be held in Cleveland, July 18-21 and the latter in Philadelphia, July 25-28), there to nominate the respective parties’ presidential candidate. This is followed by four televised presidential debates, which in turn are followed by the general election on Nov. 8.

More delegates can be won on Super Tuesday than on any other day, thus candidates seeking the presidency must do well there or be left by the wayside. Call it the winnowing process or, if you wish, the Darwinian drive, where the fittest will survive and the weak will perish.

Anything could happen between now and then. In effect, neither Trump nor Sanders should today, as New Hampshire winners, count their chickens. Both could lose their bearings while Clinton and, say, Cruz regain their footing. American presidential elections never cease to amaze. Upsets have taken place — bedeviling not only pollsters but voters. In presidential elections, there have been unexpected landslide victories and victories decided by the narrowest of margins.

Consider in this regard the Nixon-Kennedy election in 1960, when Kennedy won the presidency by (hold on to your hat) 120,000 in the popular vote. Conversely, consider the 1972 election when Nixon — now playing the comeback kid — beat George McGovern in one of the greatest landslides in the nation’s history, if you counted the popular vote (Nixon, roughly 47 million, McGovern a paltry 29 million). The victory, however, was even more lopsided if you counted the Electoral College votes — 520 to 17.

And you want crazy, here’s crazy: In the 2000 presidential election, more Americans cast their ballots for Al Gore, in the popular vote, than for George W. Bush, but Bush won the presidency because he was awarded the majority of the electoral college votes.

If you think the American political system — along with its quadrennial presidential elections — is a riddle wrapped in a mystery, then think of how in the middle of all this, you find, well, middle-class Americans who are, as the Irish American satirist J.B. O’Rourke called them, the muddle in the middle. And that’s where the enigma kicks in.