Joe Biden may have won the election, but so much rests in Trump’s hands

What Trump, his advisors and surrogates say in the coming days and weeks will be the key signal for his supporters

Over the last week America and the world have remained affixed to their screens as the electoral college map toggled between red and blue. The headline analysis has been that the US election was more contested but the electoral process executed more smoothly than expected. The boarding up of shops and stockpiling of guns and ammunition was premature and alarmist.  

Vice President Joe Biden has now secured more than the requisite 270 electoral college votes and will become the next president of the United State of America, alongside the historic Vice President-elect Senator Kamala Harris. Yet, even as Biden’s supporters jubilantly flood the streets in Washington DC, New York and elsewhere, the country is not out of the woods.  

While receiving significantly less airtime during election week, armed supporters of President Donald Trump forced a vote counting facility in Maricopa County, Arizona to shut down to the public over safety concerns, a new online group calling itself “Stop the Steal” galvanized hundreds of thousands of supporters until it was removed from Facebook, and some of the largest protests since George Floyd’s death have been held across the country from Los Angeles, to Minneapolis, New York and DC.

All eyes are now on Trump. Thus far in his post-election appearances and across Twitter, Trump is decrying purported (and unsubstantiated) election irregularities, theft and fraud, preparing to harvest the fruits of seeds sown in the months leading up to the election.

Academic scholarship on electoral violence has identified a fundamental relationship between electoral fraud or (in this case) perceptions of electoral fraud and incidences of electoral violence. What Trump, his advisors and surrogates say in the coming days and weeks, especially now that the election has been called for Biden, will be the key signal for Trump’s supporters. A swift concession by Trump would go a long way to alleviate the potential for volatility. Continuing to pull the narrative lever of illegitimacy around last Tuesday’s elections raises the risks of unrest and violent responses by those in America aggrieved by the election outcome.  

This will look like a convergence of pro-Trump supporters and anti-Trump activists around the Georgia state house during the vote recount, “Stop the Steal” members descending on Philadelphia County as the Trump court battles in Pennsylvania wage on, pro-Trump demonstrations around the White House intersecting with pro-Biden supporters, armed Proud Boys in Michigan holding rallies in Michigan, and Antifa protesters clashing with police in New York City.  

It is a telling example in US history that in 2000, the combustible presidential election concluded not because the Supreme Court in Bush v Gore ruled to end the election, but because Vice President Al Gore saw no path forward and conceded. Unless and until Trump makes the same calculus, the country remains at a precarious crossroads.  

Last week’s election once again exposed the long-present fault lines (economic, racial, geographic, partisan) in America that have been accentuated over the last four years and accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Over 74m Americans voted for a Biden presidency, but more than 70m voted for Trump’s reelection. Like the predicted “red mirage” in voting that unfolded over the last week, there is the potential for a “calm mirage”: a false sense that stability has already won out and that all is resolved.  

As Biden has conveyed in his post-election rhetoric of healing the nation, there is a pathway back to a more perfect union, but, for now, and as it has over the last four years, so much rests in Trump’s hands.  

Dr Lindsay Newman is a senior political analyst