America’s nightmare goes on – and it only has itself to blame

There are significant casualties of this result, not least democracy, writes Sean O’Grady

Donald Trump at his campaign headquarters (AP)

So, no landslide then, and America’s nightmare goes on. A nation so evenly and so bitterly divided looks set for much more anguish. It’s difficult to see this ending in a good place, whoever wins. Of course, Donald Trump didn’t help. Characteristically, when things don’t seem to be going his way, he lashed out, makes wild claims, accuses people of cheating: “They are trying to steal the election.”  

As he himself warned the world at the end of the campaign, he finds losing difficult. You can say that again. We surely know that this particular tweet was his own work because of the (incorrect) reference to votes being cast after “the Poles” had closed.  

When Trump claims that “a very sad group of people” is trying to disenfranchise the American people “and we won't stand for it”, we know what he is saying – “cry havoc”. 

The next step, whether Trump or Joe Biden ends up ahead, will probably be for the loser to send the lawyers in. The stakes are just too high, the prize too valuable not to have a go at getting something out of the courts. Again the agonies will drag on, the conspiracy theories will multiply and fewer and fewer will accept the 2020 contest as a free and fair election. It will be painfully ironic, given the record turnout and, though it turned sometimes to excess, the wide democratic engagement it encouraged. The legacy may be that many will simply give up on a process they fear is broken.  

That’s true of the electoral college system too. It has its rationale in a federal state, but the mostly “winner takes all” constituencies and gross disparity with the overall popular vote is damaging its legitimacy. Few, even in American political circles, understand its arcane ways. It is an antique institution, but not an especially attractive one. It leaves voters in California, or Utah, for example, ignored in presidential campaigns that of necessity have to concentrate on about half a dozen swing “battleground” states. A relative handful of electoral districts is where the future of America is determined, at the expense of the wider community of voters.  

Thus far there are some significant casualties strewn across the battleground. The opinion pollsters, for instance, have to account for another humiliation. The Democrat strategists, too, failed to make the most of their opportunities. The electoral system itself is compromised, and the checks and balances in the Constitution designed to restrain an overly partisan presidency feel like they are rusty and unreliable. We will soon see how America’s overwrought electorate reacts to events. Few emerge from this fight with much to be proud about.  

Whatever the outcome, what is painfully apparent is that, at the time of writing, some 65 million Americans were content to put Donald Trump back in White House for four more years. After all that has happened in the last four crazed years, the casual insults, the devaluation of the presidency, the mad ideas, the contempt for democracy, the trashing of the nation’s reputation, the callous loss of life in the Covid crisis and, most grievous, provoking ugly racial tensions, many Americans still support Trump, and some even love him. The Democrats have questions to answer about their campaign, but the world is right to wonder what has befallen American democracy.