Connect with us

Economics

This campaign is also demonstrating America’s democratic vitality

Published

on

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American journalist and human-rights activist, likes to tell a story about walking through New York after appearing on various cable-TV networks to crusade against Iran’s oppression of women. Ms Alinejad, who has a nimbus of spiralling curls that makes her easy to recognise, describes being stopped by people who wanted to voice their support. But on one block a person pleaded with her not to appear again on Fox News (“They are miserable”) while on the next a person urged her to stop going on CNN (“They are using you”).

“I was like, ‘Wow, wow—guys, having Fox News and CNN is the beauty of America,’” Ms Alinejad said, speaking at the Global Free Speech Summit at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 18th, just days before prosecutors in Manhattan would charge four men, including a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, with plotting to kill her in 2022. Americans who wanted to cancel either network and watch only one, Ms Alinejad continued, might consider life in North Korea or Iran, where “You only see people repeating the narrative of the government, and you only see your family members and your heroes doing false confession in order to survive.”

That is a low bar. However, it is a fair point, and a chastening one as the climax approaches of an election campaign that has members of both parties despairing about their democracy. American news organisations may not always make the best use of their freedom, yet their very freedom to misuse their freedom is a measure of what keeps America great. In Ms Alinejad’s spirit, it seems worth considering other ways in which this much maligned campaign is revealing the vitality of America’s democracy—along with the pernicious effects of negative partisanship explored in our Essay this week.

Start with what can be a basic vital sign: participation. A generation ago, when about half of eligible voters might turn up at the polls, America’s mandarins were sounding warnings about voter apathy and assembling commissions to overcome it. But two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots in 2020, the highest proportion since 1900, and voting in the midterms of 2018 and 2022 reached levels not seen in decades. This autumn some states with early voting are setting records for participation. (A related sign of vitality is that, contrary to worries that threats and scorn directed at election officials would scare off poll workers, state offices are reporting ample levels of volunteers and paid staff.)

Along with surging registration of new voters, higher turnout is changing the composition of the electorate in unpredictable ways. This shift appears to be settling dumb debates within both parties in recent years over whether turning out partisans matters far more than persuading independent-minded voters to support your candidate. In a changing yet evenly divided electorate, both turnout and persuasion are essential, and the campaigns have been putting this rather obvious insight into practice. More competition for more voters can only benefit the country.

Indeed, one cause or effect, or both, of these efforts at persuasion is that America is becoming less polarised by race. Both parties have discarded facile assumptions that black or Latino voters are monolithic on matters such as illegal immigration or policing. The left’s conviction that Donald Trump was succeeding solely by catering to white people began to fray after the 2020 election, when he made gains among Latino, Asian and black voters. He is courting them more vigorously in this campaign. That outreach has clashed at times with his core emphasis, reaching disaffected young men, as when a comedian popular with that group managed the rare feat of upstaging Mr Trump by telling racist jokes before he spoke at Madison Square Garden on October 27th.

Kamala Harris has been trying to reverse Democratic erosion among young non-white Americans while also trying to reach beyond her party’s base of voters with college degrees. Rather than repeating Joe Biden’s promises to erase college-loan debt, she is emphasising that she will create jobs that do not require a college education. “We understand a college degree is not the only measure of whether a worker has skills and experience to get the job done,” she declared at a rally in Flint, Michigan, in early October.

Ms Harris has also been bidding to win back rural voters Democrats have all but ignored in recent campaigns, while Mr Trump has been campaigning in big cities—and both of them appear to be having some success. Ms Harris has campaigned in solidly red Texas while Mr Trump has campaigned in such Democratic strongholds as California and New York. Both have campaigned with members of the opposing party, though Mr Trump’s few Democrats, such as Robert Kennedy junior, are party misfits of longer standing than Ms Harris’s Republicans, some of whom once worked for Mr Trump.

Use it or lose it

The imperative to attract less partisan voters has also compelled both candidates to moderate some of their more extreme views. Ms Harris has backed off leftist positions she espoused in 2019. Mr Trump, who has moved his party towards the centre on matters such as entitlements and gay rights, has been clumsily trying to moderate his stance on reproductive freedoms after a backlash he clearly did not expect to the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion.

Far more than other protest movements this century, the grassroots movement to restore abortion rights is proving durable and effective. It has won in all six states that have had plebiscites on abortion rights so far, including such conservative ones as Kansas and Kentucky. Americans, it seems, have not forgotten how to put their democracy to use in defence of their liberty.

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our new Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Economics

How we will cover a second Trump presidency

Published

on

This is the introduction to The Economist this week, a free weekly newsletter that includes a note from our editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes.

Sign up for The Economist this week

The world has just witnessed a historic turn. Donald Trump’s election as America’s 47th president was not a fluke: his victory was decisive. By securing more than 70m votes, he has won the popular vote for the first time in three attempts. The Republican Party now runs the Senate and is likely, within days, to secure control of the House. Add that the Supreme Court will be firmly entrenched with MAGA values for a generation. All this constitutes a stunning comeback and provides a powerful mandate for Mr Trump; in our cover leader we call him the most consequential American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Our weekly edition considers what a second Trump presidency means. If Mr Trump has wrecked the old order, what will take its place? Will the return of Trumponomics spark a global trade war? How will Mr Trump handle the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East? His sweeping victory could set the tone for fellow nationalist populists such as Marine Le Pen, who hopes to secure France’s presidency in 2027. Mr Trump was too easily dismissed as an aberration in his first term. Not now. He has defined a new political era, for America and the world.

Subscribers can now sign up to participate in our live digital event on Friday November 8th, where our editors will discuss the election’s aftermath and what comes next. I also recommend the US in brief, our daily newsletter devoted to the most important matters in American politics.

Wherever you live, Mr Trump’s presidency will affect you. Over the next four years, we will report on and analyse the effects of the second Trump presidency on policy, business, economics and more—in America and around the world.

I invite you to be a part of this. If you already subscribe to The Economist, thank you.

Continue Reading

Economics

Opinion polls underestimated Donald Trump again

Published

on

FOR THE third presidential election in a row Donald Trump has stumped America’s pollsters. As results came in on election night it became clear that polls had again underestimated enthusiasm for Mr Trump in many states. In Iowa, days before the election a well-regarded poll by Ann Selzer had caused a stir by showing Kamala Harris ahead by three percentage points. In the end, Mr Trump won the state by 13 points.

Overall, the polling miss was far smaller. Polls accurately captured a close contest in the national popular vote and correctly forecast tight races in each of the battleground states. National polls erred by less than they did in 2020, and state polls improved on their dismal performances in 2020 and 2016. Yet this will be little comfort to pollsters who have been grappling with Mr Trump’s elusive supporters for years.

The Economist’s nationwide polling average found Kamala Harris leading by 1.5 percentage points, overestimating her advantage by around three points (many votes have yet to be counted), compared with an average error of 2.7 points in past cycles. State polling averages from FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit, had an average error of 3.0, smaller than the average of 4.2 points since 1976.

Chart: The Economist

But in contrast to 2016, when pollsters’ misses were concentrated in certain states, those in this cycle were nearly uniform across state and national polls. In the seven key states, polling averages underestimated Mr Trump’s margin by between 1.5 and 3.5 points (see chart). Pollsters may claim that their surveys captured the “story” of the election. But the awkward question remains: why did they underestimate Mr Trump for the third cycle in a row?

In past election cycles, pollsters have tweaked survey “weights” to make their samples of voters more representative. Although polls aim to sample the population randomly, in practice they often systematically miss certain groups. Weights are used to increase the influence of under-represented respondents. This has been especially true in recent years as response rates have plummeted.

After the 2016 election, when surveys systematically missed voters without college degrees and therefore underestimated support for Mr Trump, pollsters began accounting for respondents’ education levels. And after 2020, in an effort to ensure that Republican voters were represented, more pollsters began weighting their samples by respondents’ party registration and self-reported voting history. This caused the range of poll outcomes to narrow (weighting reduces the variance of survey results), with many pollsters finding similar results in key states and nationwide.

If there is a lesson from this year’s election, it could be that there is a limit to what weighting can solve. Although pollsters may artificially make a sample “representative” on the surface, if they do not address the root causes of differential response rates, they will not solve the underlying problem. They also introduce many subjective decisions, which can be worth almost eight points of margin in any given poll.

A pollster which gets those decisions right appears to be prophetic. But with limited transparency before the election, it is hard to know which set of assumptions each has made, and whether they are the correct ones. To their credit, the pollsters get together to conduct comprehensive post-election reviews. This year’s may be revealing. Still, without a breakthrough technology that can boost the representativeness of survey samples, weighting alone is unlikely to solve pollsters’ difficulty in getting a reliable read on what Trump voters are thinking.

Continue Reading

Economics

Donald Trump also won a reprieve from justice

Published

on

IT WAS A high-stakes election for all Americans, most of all Donald Trump. Had he lost, there was a fair chance that he would have gone to prison. He faces four separate sets of criminal charges, each with a prospect of jail time. Instead, once back in the White House, Mr Trump will be able to quash his two federal indictments and the two state cases against him are all but certain to be frozen.

That Mr Trump has managed to largely evade legal accountability is partly a result of his stalling for time, in anticipation of this very outcome. His strategy was aided by the Supreme Court, a third of whose justices he appointed. And yet his supporters see a justice system that is pliable and easily weaponised. To some in MAGA world, Mr Trump’s threats to train it against his political enemies now sound eminently reasonable.

The first post-election piece of business in Mr Trump’s trials will come in the hush-money case in Manhattan, where, barring further delay, he is due to be sentenced on November 26th. In May he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a payment to a porn star. Each charge carries a maximum of four years in prison. Yet there is hardly any chance of the judge imposing jail time—constitutional scholars agree that a sitting president cannot be locked up. In any event Mr Trump’s lawyers will probably ask to postpone sentencing until after his term in office ends.

Next come the two federal cases brought by Jack Smith, a special counsel in the Department of Justice (DOJ). Mr Trump stands accused of refusing to return classified documents upon leaving the White House and of attempting to overturn his defeat after the 2020 election. He denies wrongdoing in both. DOJ policy says that a president cannot be prosecuted while in office. Extinguishing these cases is simple: Mr Trump can fire Mr Smith and direct DOJ lawyers to drop them. He can do this even before his attorney-general is confirmed, notes Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor.

In Georgia, meanwhile, Mr Trump faces charges in state court over his meddling in the 2020 election. The case is on hold while an appeals court weighs whether the prosecutor who brought the charges should be removed for alleged impropriety. If it ever gets going again, it will not include Mr Trump so long as he is the sitting president. But his 14 remaining co-defendants could still stand trial.

Then there is the civil litigation against Mr Trump for his role in the January 6th riot. Several Capitol police officers have sued him, alleging that he instigated the attack; courts are in the middle of sorting out whether his conduct is immune from civil liability. If they say it is not immune, precedent suggests that civil suits against a sitting president can proceed.

Soon enough attention will turn from Mr Trump’s legal jeopardy to that of his opponents, whom he has vowed to target. At a MAGA victory party attended by your correspondent, shortly before the conga line started, several of his supporters suggested that Joe Biden ought to drop the federal prosecutions against Mr Trump as a show of goodwill. Then one gleefully added that she would love to see their man “take the Bidens down”.

Continue Reading

Trending