There's nothing new in the west. As of press time, Arizona and Nevada were still counting votes, and a few days after the election, Americans still don't know who won the 2020 presidential race.
Democratic challenger Joe Biden was closer to the White House after scooping up two Midwestern states – Wisconsin and Michigan – and was at 264 electoral votes (253 without Arizona, on which the news networks are in disagreement), but it seems that the uncertainty is enormous and the leads are tiny. A fitting end to a year that was all twists and turns.
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Trump, who has 214 electoral votes, knows there is only one way he can win, and that hangs on one state: Pennsylvania. Without the Keystone State, all the other states in play are irrelevant, unless a state that was already declared blue miraculously changes color.
Trump also knows that in the battle for public opinion, he has to go with the momentum. Just as the George W. Bush camp dictated the agenda in the Florida drama of 2000, Trump has tried in the past few days to dictate the agenda, including through lawsuits his campaign has filed against Clark County in Nevada, on the grounds that it allegedly allowed people who were ineligible to vote in the state to cast ballots. This is also why he is filing petitions against various counties in Pennsylvania – to ensure that they allow his observers access, including Philadelphia County, the area thanks to which he won the state, and the presidency, in 2016.
Despite all the controversy surrounding these actions, which are supposedly preventing counties from counting votes through familiar procedures, it must be said that Trump's lawsuits have had partial success – in one county in Pennsylvania a court ruled in his favor, and his observers have been given broader access; in another county, counting was suspended until Friday, because a court was persuaded that there were some tens of thousands of ballots that it wasn't clear whether or not should be counted, as many were sent out in error and then returned. Another 7,000 ballots were found to be faulty.
The wheel won't be turned back
No matter the results of the various lawsuits, at the moment Trump isn't showing signs that he intends to give up. The math and the count are still in Biden's favor, and if an atmosphere of the "president-elect" is created, it will be hard to turn the wheel back.
Trump also knows that it will be much harder to petition the courts after the states have finished the formal processes of awarding their electoral votes to the winning party. It's always easier to stop a count than to take away votes that have already been declared official – both legally and in terms of how it looks. And as bad as it looks right now, Trump believes that the courts will give him legitimacy if he proves he has a case. And he has, at least he appears to have, a number of serious cases.
We must remember that this isn't an unusual or anti-democratic move by Trump, but part of the way in which Trump has already branded himself and the unofficial movement he has created: an authentic and colorful candidate, who doesn't operate in the conventional mold.
For example, in the midst of the waves of COVID in the US in recent months, Trump continued to hold his rallies and at the end even called to step them up in an almost unprecedented blitz of intensity --- even though that created a problematic image and drew criticism about a lack of social distancing during COVID.
To the same extent, he has continued to make provocative remarks and give bombastic interviews to all media outlets these past few months (as he did throughout his presidency). Even when he caused uproars, he saw that as an advantage, because by doing so he could control the agenda. He had only one goal: to preserve his base in order to get them to go out and vote en masse. Trump knew that without firing up his base of supporters, he had no chance of repeating his success of 2016 and that without upholding his image as a different kind of candidate and branding the Democrats as "establishment," he had no change.
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Even though it might turn out that he hasn't won the election, he got very close to his 2016 achievement and beat all the polls' predictions. Exit polls show that in areas that are strongly red, Trump managed to convince voters that Biden is a socialist, would cozy up to the elites, strangle the economy, and severely hamper the lives of the citizens. The same went for the rallies: it's possible that they convinced the voters a second time to turn out in droves on Election Day, and even before it. It's possible that it wasn't enough, but his anti-establishment conduct managed to give Trump a chance for a second term, even during a pandemic.
In the city of Las Vegas, while Nevada was counting votes, people from the Trump campaign held a press conference at which they warned that there was real concern about voter fraud in the city. They claimed that at least 10,000 people had allegedly voted who didn't even live in the country. They got to that level of detail. Donald Trump doesn't mean to forgo the White House, and he will claim that the election was stolen until everyone hears him.
Lessons of 2000
In Washington, a quiet tension could be felt yesterday. Many businesses were boarded up, and ones that hadn't already done so called in workmen, fearing riots.
Trump himself continued to claim on Thursday that he had won in Pennsylvania. Mostly, his people don't understand why in the Midwest people stopped voting on the eve of the election. The way they see it, the foremost goal is to get to a situation in which the battle is over a single state in which he has a lead, small as it might be, like Pennsylvania.
It's clear to him that Bush's success in the battle for Florida stemmed from setting clear battle lines that allowed both a legal victory and a PR victory. Throughout the 2000 campaign, Bush had a clear message: only a single count of all ballots can be legitimate.
While the Republicans have held onto that catchy message, the Democrats, under Al Gore, made a strategic mistake – they tried to hold a recount, but only in counties where it was convenient for them, and only by a method that was convenient for them. In the end, the Supreme Court was forced to intervene, and ruled – because constitutionally time had run out to resolve the issue – that Bush would hold onto his lead, and would be the winner in Florida. This is why it's so important for Trump to hold onto his lead.
However, if there is anything encouraging in everything we saw yesterday and these past few days, it's the caution of the various networks. Even CNN isn't rushing to eulogize Trump. Fox News, which took a volley of criticism from Republicans for rushing to declare that Arizona had gone blue, warned about fraud, and said that concerns pointed out by the Trump campaign must be looked into.
Another White House?
Either way, while we wait for the results, diplomats in Washington have started to assess what America under Biden will look like. They think that the US will demonstrate openness toward Iran in order to renew the 2015 nuclear deal and will emphasize normalization with the Palestinians – which could even include reopening the PLO mission in Washington, as vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris promised to do in an interview she gave a month ago.
And, of course, there is the prevailing believe that Biden will allow the US's enemy a lot of room to maneuver in the world. But all that aside, the sense is that Trump's legacy is so strong that it will force Biden to toe a similar line in order to uphold the stature and prestige of the US against North Korea and Iran, at least at the start of his term in office.
Now many Americans are waiting for the winner to be declared, before America heads into a downward spiral, to say the least. What is certain – the post-election campaign will be no less base than the election itself.
