What’s at stake in the US presidential election 2020

On November 3, one of the most significant elections in US history will draw to a close.

It is no stretch to say that many believe the 2020 presidential campaign to be the most consequential – and most fateful – of any American election since 1864, when the existence of the Union, and with it the survival or extinction of slavery, was on the ballot.

Donald Trump’s presidency, and his takeover of the Republican Party, has been framed as a direct assault on the principles and institutions of liberal democracy and the rule of law that has ever risen from within an established liberal democracy.

His Democratic challenger and fellow septuagenarian Joe Biden on the other hand, is pegged as the return to ‘normal’ candidate, who will bring America back from the precipice and restore its prestige after four years of an erosion of norms and ceaseless scandals.

Trump still has a path to a second term – but as it stands it would take a polling debacle that makes 2016 look trivial.

According to a series of polls following the last Trump-Biden debate, the president’s chances of securing a victory now require winning states where he still trails with only a day to go until voting concludes.

In most of the core battleground states, the former vice president has maintained a stable, though not overwhelming lead over Trump.

At the time of writing, in Florida, Biden leads by between 3 and 5 points. The latest averages in Pennsylvania show him with a 5-point lead. Biden’s lead has grown to nearly 2 points in Wisconsin, and he’s ahead by at least 2 points in Arizona and North Carolina.

Back in 2016, there were a larger-than-usual share of voters who maintained that they were undecided or preferred a third-party candidate – a warning signal that Hillary Clinton’s lead was not safe. Clinton was not a well-liked nominee and Trump, her even more detested opponent, was gaining momentum in the closing weeks of the race.

None of that is happening this year: there are fewer undecideds in the polls and Biden is viewed much more favourably than Clinton was by a narrow majority of voters in the country.

While Trump hasn’t appeared to have closed enough of the gap that would be necessary, another comeback Electoral College victory would be a massive black mark for pollsters.

The great equaliser for the Republican candidates who won the presidency despite losing the popular vote – from George W Bush Jr in 2000 to Trump in 2016 – has been the Electoral College, whereby voters decide state-level contests rather than the national one, which is why it’s possible for a candidate to win the most votes nationally but still be defeated by the Electoral College.

Each state gets a certain number of Electoral College votes partly based on its population and there is a total of 538 up for grabs, so the winner is the candidate that captures 270 or more votes.

US citizens aged 18 years or over are eligible to vote in the presidential election, which takes place every four years.

However, many states have passed laws requiring voters to show identification documents to prove who they are before they can vote. 

These laws are often put in place by Republicans who say it is to guard against voter fraud, but Democrats accuse them of using it as a form of voter suppression, often against poor and minority voters.

Voters will also be choosing new members of Congress when they fill in their ballots. Democrats already have control of the House of Representatives so they will look to keep hold of that while also trying to gain control of the Senate from the Republicans. All 435 seats in the House are up for election this year, while 33 Senate seats are up for grabs.

Election officials are expecting a large increase of mail-in ballots and early in-person voting, as well as a large turnout on Election Day. This could mean that the process of counting ballots may take longer than in previous elections, and potential legal challenges could also delay the results of key races.

It can take several days for every vote to be counted – and there is already warning that the wait might stretch into even weeks for the result this year because of an expected surge in postal ballots.

Once the votes are all counted, the results will be confirmed – and the implications are vast.

Newly elected policymakers in federal and state governments will be expected to immediately address several ongoing national crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic, a cratering economy, climate change, and systemic racism – all while working to unite a deeply divided public.

Fate of the republic at stake?

Over the months leading up to the election, a consensus among everyone from mainstream media pundits (outside of Fox News), diplomats, political scientists, historians to national security officials has emerged: A second Trump term could irreparably damage the 244-year-old experiment of the American Republic.

The narrative goes that after a first term in which Trump openly defied Congress and the courts, dismissed electoral norms, moulded foreign policy to serve his personal interests, his reelection would legitimise the gutting of institutions and the founders’ checks and balances – and with it, bury the idea of the US being an ‘exceptional’ democracy with the likes of ancient Greece and Rome.

With the US still being the most powerful country and occupying such a central place in stabilising the global system which it was the prime architect of, the 2020 election is being compared to other important global realignments that transformed the fates of former great powers and empires. But could that be overstated?

If Trump is reelected, those who see his administration in existential terms will continue to view his presidency through the prism of an unravelling postwar liberal order. And it would be an affirmation that Trumpism is the direction Americans want to go.

If defeated, Trump's detractors might prefer to consider him an aberration, rather than a symptom.

A newly inaugurated President Biden, a liberal internationalist committed to preserving traditional US alliances, would likely look to act swiftly by rejoining international treaties like the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Agreement, while attempting to reverse Trump’s approaches to the pandemic, economic recovery, political polarisation, global stability and climate change, as he and his running mate Kamala Harris have promised to do.

A general view is that America’s excessive ambition and overreach carry with it the seeds of its own destruction; caught in the inevitable cycle of history where great powers grow decadent and eventually collapse, as realist political thinkers like John Mearsheimer have argued.

Whether one election can reverse the cycle of history is unlikely.

Democracy’s foundations

What further makes this an unprecedented election is that the fundamental act of voting itself is under scrutiny, as how people vote has become a contentious issue this year due to the pandemic.

Some politicians have called for wider use of postal ballots, but Trump said that this could result in more voter fraud.

Trump has consistently attacked the presidential electoral process as unfair and rigged against him, and on mail-in voting as inherently fraudulent and invalid – accusations the president’s critics believe is aimed at confusing and scaring voters to create uncertainty about the election’s outcome.

And in some cases, that divisive rhetoric has worked.

Ballot collection boxes in California and Massachusetts have been set ablaze, thousands of requested mail ballots have gone missing in Pennsylvania, hundreds more ballots were never delivered in Detroit, and armed Trump supporters are prowling around polling sites in Florida.

Meanwhile federal courts, increasingly disinclined to count all ballots for fear they might “flip the results,” are cracking down on states’ attempts to do just that. A federal appeals court ruled last week that mailed-in ballots in the swing state of Minnesota must be received by election day to be counted.

“I think [the election] will end up in the Supreme Court,” Trump said on September 23, a forecast he reiterated during his second debate with Biden on September 29.

By questioning the integrity of mail-in voting and refusing to commit himself to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses, Trump has nodded at America’s highest court to come to his rescue – three justices of whom are his appointees – should he fail to win a clear victory.

Trump could theoretically pressure Republican legislatures in battleground states to award him their state’s electors, even if the formal vote-counting machinery ultimately declares a Biden victory in the state. It would then fall to the courts and Congress to determine who won in the disputed states, recounting the Bush v Gore nightmare of 2000, with the potential to be even far more polarising.

That is not to even mention the potential for violence.

During the first debate, he called on the white supremacist militia group The Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” after being confronted with the response that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security both designate white supremacists as the primary domestic and national security threat to the country.

With social fissures widening and talk of civil war looming on the horizon, there is further ammunition for those who view the election in existential terms.

All these ingredients make for a volatile election and post-election result unlike any before it.