‘I think Biden will become the president, almost certainly’: Dr Brian Klaas on U.S. election 2020
UCL Associate Professor in Global Politics, Dr Brian Klaas, comments on possible election results, Donald Trump’s campaign and the rise of misinformation, as final ballots are counted up across the Atlantic.
Dr Brian Klaas
Dr Brian Klaas is an associate professor in Global Politics at University College London (UCL) and a columnist for the Washington Post. Prior to becoming an academic, Dr Klaas worked on U.S. campaigns - including serving as the Deputy Campaign Manager for Mark Dayton's successful bid for Governor of Minnesota. His latest book “How to Rig an Election”, which he co-authored with Dr Nic Cheeseman, exposes the limitations of national elections as a means of promoting democratisation.
Right now, Biden’s win depends on a few key states. What do you think is the most likely way through which he will win the presidency?
I expect in the coming hours that they will probably declare Pennsylvania for him, and that will be the end of the election, even if he were to lose Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. Pennsylvania ends things completely. I think that he is going to win Georgia, probably, but it is going to be really, really close, and then there will be a recount. He is very likely to win Nevada and Arizona.
So, the most likely outcome right now is a reasonably decisive victory, actually, for Biden: 306 electoral votes is what that would add up to, 270 is the threshold you need. Trump won 306 electoral votes in 2016 and claimed it as a landslide, and it is not. I mean, it is nowhere near the largest victory a president has ever had. On the other hand, there is a series of states that were not expected to be democratic states four years ago, that now look like they are – especially Georgia and Arizona.
I think Biden will become the president, almost certainly. Trump is going to lie about the election results, as he did last night. It will be a test of the country to see how many people go along with it, and also a test to see if anyone becomes violent. That is one thing I’m particularly worried about.
Prior to the election, Biden was predicted a strong win. Considering this, why do you think that Trump has performed so strongly?
It is interesting because on the popular vote level, we may end up looking like the polls nationally were pretty right. That is the thing - the votes keep coming in from the mail-in ballots and the absentee ballots, which are overwhelmingly democratic. Biden is currently up by four or five million votes, and he will probably win the popular vote by something like four per cent. The polls had him around seven or eight per cent, so they will be off, but not catastrophically off.
At the state level, the polls were wrong. Especially in states like Florida and Ohio - we are talking like eight or nine point inaccuracies in the polling averages versus what happened, which is big. Those are historic-level mistakes. Trump will have gotten a large number of votes because the voter turnout was high, so he expanded the amount of votes that he actually received from 2016. Part of that was because he was able to gain a lot of rural, white, non-college educated base that has been the core of Trump’s political coalition to turn out again, and he ran up the score in rural areas.
He also ran up the score among minority communities. Democrats still won African American voters, they still won among Latino voters, but certain blocks of those groups did swing considerably towards Trump. The biggest change was in Miami-Dade County in Southern Florida. Last time around, it was a decisive lead for Clinton, but this time it was very close.
Some of that was due to the labelling of Joe Biden as a “secret socialist.” Many Latino voters in South Florida have emigrated from (or their parents emigrated from) Cuba or Venezuela. The Trump campaign has been running attack ads saying “do you want this to become the next left-wing dictatorship,” which was effective.
The other way of reading the election, is that, if you told Democrats on Tuesday nights that this would be the result, assuming that Biden squeaks out leads and wins these core four states are left, I think every Democrat would be happy with that result. That is a big swing from four years ago. There is a lot of Democratic pickups on the map. But it was not a repudiation of Trump in the way that most people expected, and I think a lot of people expected a 70 to 30 or 60 to 40 landslide. That is a testament to Trump’s campaign getting its base to vote.
Trump’s campaign has launched a variety of lawsuits intending to stop votes from being counted. Are these lawsuits realistic, or are they simply a political ploy?
The big picture is that this is a political strategy - I think the Trump campaign knows that they are not going to win. The point of these lawsuits is to try and convince Trump’s base that the election is illegitimate - both because that helps him politically, and because it helps him save face. That’s very important to him, given how much he hates losing.
I think there is also a question, in terms of the specific lawsuits, as to what they would look like. The problem is that there has been a disconnect between Trump’s Twitter feed, his speeches, and legal reality. In a court, you can’t just stand up and say in all capital letters, “fake news, stop the counting,” you have to actually say, “these ballots should be invalidated for these specific reasons.”
The only legal challenge that I think has any possibility of being taken seriously is the one in Pennsylvania that says “any postal ballots that arrived after the election but were sent before the election should not be counted.” That’s part of Trump’s legal challenge. It is not enough votes to matter – I don’t think it will prove decisive in any way – and that is exactly the problem here. Even if that happens, we are in a situation right now where it is looking as if Biden will have a substantial buffer. Even if you get one of these court challenges to work out, it is a small number of ballots in one state, so even if Trump wins that you have got this sort of buffer of additional states he would need to overturn.
He can try to do a recount in Wisconsin, he can try to do a legal challenge in Pennsylvania. Most of them, probably all of them, are going to fail. The reality is that the votes are counted accurately. He just got fewer votes.
There is no legal system that awards races based on you not being happy that you got fewer votes.
In Bush v. Gore, which is the precedent for this, we were talking about 500 votes difference in one of the largest states in the country, which decided the election. There were legitimate questions over which votes should and should not be counted. That is when you have a really narrow margin, where you have to say “this one is out.” However, when you are talking between 20, 000 and 100, 000 ballots, it is just not going to change.
I think what will happen today is that there will be a declaration by the media that Biden has won, and I think Trump will reject that result. Legal challenges may proceed, but they won’t affect the outcome.
How do you see Trump’s behaviour during the past few days impacting future presidential elections? More broadly, has Trump irreparably damaged U.S. democracy?
The situation is: Trump declared victory when he has almost certainly lost, he is lying about the mail-in ballots, and so I think the real question is whether that does lasting damage to the view that the elections are legitimate. Certain segments of the population are never going to believe that this was a real result. This speaks to how disinformation and social media has defined a lot of the Trump era, and it speaks also his strategy to delegitimise mainstream press outlets who actually report facts. A lot his supporters don’t believe the press anymore, so they get their information from accounts online which have an agenda.
There is a perfect example of this yesterday, where there was a video of a journalist loading his camera into a van. The video went viral because commentators claimed he was loading ballots into the van. There was also a viral tweet where someone claimed their dead relative had voted, when really this relative was sent a ballot because they hadn’t cleaned up their database yet, and the ballot would have been rejected had it been returned.
You can take snippets from what occurs in totally normal election administration and twist them to appear illegitimate, and that is going to have really long-term effects. Trump’s strategy is to convince a third of the country that Biden is not a legitimately elected president, and that is going to have ramifications going into 2021, when Biden is supposed to be trying to bring the country together.
I think the risk of violence before inauguration is going to be high. This hasn’t made international news yet, but there was a foiled plot in Philadelphia to attack a vote-counting centre last night by someone who had a gun. How predictable is that? Could anyone possibly be surprised that someone in his base thought that the right thing to do was to try and stop the vote count?
His rhetoric really matters, and I think it will have long-term effects.
Considering that Biden will likely win, how will Trump use his last moments in the White House?
There are two things I’m worried about, one of which is Trump sabotaging the transition. There is this period up until January 20, where you need the transition to work smoothly, and it doesn’t always work smoothly in the best of times, it is always a bit contentious. The Biden administration needs to be up to speed on what is going to happen, whether that is on the coronavirus, on the economy, or other matters – and Trump could sabotage that.
There is also the question of whether he tries to pardon himself or his family, because the investigations into his business dealings are ongoing, and he won’t be protected as president anymore. The constitution basically gives unlimited pardon to the president. Now, this has never happened in the U.S. before.
When Nixon resigned, he was pardoned, but that was part of the deal. This time around, who knows what will happen.