World Archives

Thursday

5 Nov 2020

How the ‘diploma divide’ helps explain the US election result

If the US election was a television drama, the drum-roll end credits of the penultimate episode played this week and we are now waiting for the denouement. Only, there was never supposed to be a cliffhanger. An exhausted nation should have chosen boredom. Biden was meant to have been the clear victor and the political clock reset to a pre-2016 normality. But, in a plot twist that is by now so familiar we have no excuse for not anticipating it, opinion polls and commentators alike called it wrong. It’s not just in the US. All around the world, elections have become more difficult to predict. Traditional party loyalties have been

Roger Kimball

Trump is right not to concede

I am happy to see that President Trump is acting on the maxim of the month: Don’t concede if you didn’t lose. Any other GOP president would be on the defensive now. ‘Yes, there was voter fraud, but, but, but…’ That dangerous conjunction is a fledging concession just waiting to spread its wings and fly. Donald Trump does not trade in concessions. It’s one of the things about him that infuriates people. It’s also one of the reasons he is so effective. He abhors clutter. He seizes upon the main issue – there’s too much illegal immigration, our trade practices are unfair to American workers, the deep state has created

Gabriel Gavin

The EU is powerless to stop Poland’s liberal lapse

Zoliborz is one of Warsaw’s most prestigious addresses. Its leafy streets are popular with journalists, university professors and, as of last week, thousands of protestors. The suburb is home to Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland’s former prime minister who has led the ruling Law and Justice party for close to two decades. Despite holding no government office for most of that time, the control and influence he has over ministers has led many to conclude he is Poland’s head of state in all but name. It’s for that reason his home on a quiet residential avenue has become the destination of choice for marches and pickets over the past two weeks, after

Freddy Gray

Trumpism hasn’t been defeated

It’s all over, bar the litigation. Without some mind-blowing legal reversal in the coming days, Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States of America. Donald Trump must be extracted from the White House in the coming weeks, though if he is unwilling to leave nobody is quite sure how he’ll be removed. Trump believes the election has been stolen from him — so do many of the 70 million Americans who voted for him. Trust is a vanishingly rare commodity in American democracy. But Trump started crying foul weeks, even months ago. ‘This is a fraud on the American public,’ he declared in the early hours

Edward Lucas

A divided America is a gift for Putin

Russia is using a ‘drumbeat of disinformation’ to attack the American political system. That was the stark conclusion of the FBI director Christopher Wray in his testimony to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee in September. One aim, he said, was to undermine Joe Biden’s campaign. But the main thrust of the attack — as we will witness in the coming days and weeks — is to undermine public confidence in US democracy itself. To be fair, Russia did not create the problem. It was not Vladimir Putin who wrote the laws governing US elections, with their decentralised responsibilities, threadbare budgets and barnacled and opaque provisions. (Do you understand

Douglas Murray

The cameras miss what’s really happening in Washington

Washington, DC On election day in the capital there is no thrill in the air, but there is a sound: that of hardboard being placed over all of Washington’s windows. Wherever you go in the centre of town, the area is either boarded up or in the process of being so. I enjoy my sausage and eggs on a sidewalk to the accompaniment of the last windows being drilled. ‘Was everything all right?’ my waitress enquires. ‘Delicious,’ I tell her. ‘If the city is still here tomorrow, I’ll be back.’ DC feels as if it is preparing for a natural disaster, not an election result. Like all other major cities

Stephen L. Miller

Joe Biden will be a hamstrung and moderated president

At the time of writing, several key states are still tabulating or finding votes (depending on what side of the aisle you prefer). Joe Biden presently looks to be headed to the White House as the 46th President of the United States. Yet oddly there is no exuberance flooding out from Democrats or their voters. There are no mass celebrations from fellow Democrats and the professional polling industry is on life support. Vote totals in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania still need to be finalised, but Biden is clearly sitting in pole position. In a bizarre late-night appearance, President Trump and his campaign seemed poised to challenge the results and

Stephen Daisley

The New York Times is wrong about Macron’s war on Islamism

Here is what is not happening in France. France is not ‘at war with its Muslims’. Muslims are not being treated like Jews in Nazi Germany. Emmanuel Macron has not ‘strongly boosted the legitimacy of all kind of obsessive Islamophobes’, nor is he contributing to ‘the Islamophobic swamp into which France has sunk’. The French president is not ‘attacking Islam’ and he has not ‘chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims’. What is happening in France is a world away from these libels. A liberal, secular republic is grappling with the long-gestating menace of radical Islam, a reactionary separatism that has taken grip in the banlieues. While it has brought blood to

Wednesday

4 Nov 2020

Stephen Daisley

Why Democrats should abandon coercive progressivism

The first rule of Pundit Club is: election results always mean what your political prejudices want them to mean. Since I am a stickler for rules, and since everyone else is getting in on it, here is my tuppence-worth on what the results so far tell us about the US presidential election. If Joe Biden is the next President of the United States, it is a clear rebuke of the Trump White House years. The last time a Democrat presidential candidate won Arizona was Bill Clinton in 1996, so flipping the state and its 11 electoral votes is a totemic moment for Biden. The same will be the case if

Paul Wood

Donald Trump is preparing to strike his greatest deal yet

A New Yorker cartoon shows Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit. Until last night, his enemies could enjoyably salivate over that prospect. Today, it might look to them as though president Trump is not going to jail, after all. We cannot say yet whether that’s because he has won outright, or because he has lost so narrowly he can dispute the result and dictate the terms of his exit. Either way, the Joe Biden blow-out that most of the polls predicted and his supporters nervously expected has not happened. This is, as a New York Times headline said, a nail-biter. It is not yet a repeat of 2016; Biden could

Tim Ogden

A fractious America weakens the global order

The countries that formerly composed the Soviet Union states are predominantly divided into three camps: those still strongly affiliated with Russia; those who have already ascended to EU and Nato membership; and the unfortunate remainder that strive to join the West, but which continue to struggle with domestic setbacks and a lack of resolve from Washington and Brussels. Since the fall of the USSR, countries like Georgia and Ukraine have seen the USA as the embodiment of democracy, with its liberty and freedoms standing as the antithesis of Communist darkness, which dominated both countries for a century. Indeed, former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili’s love for America was so deep that

Mark Galeotti

The Kremlin relishes this American carnage

For the supposed information operations masterminds who can bend American politics to their will, the Russians seem no better at predicting the outcome of the elections than the rest of us. But they are still going to make the best of the current uncertainty. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the nationalist showman-politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky opened champagne, toasting ‘a new domestic and foreign policy in the US’ and ‘a speedy improvement of US-Russia relations.’ The foreign policy professionals, though, were scrambling, caught off guard. They had treated Trump as one of a number of weapons to launch against the presumed next president, Hillary Clinton. They never expected him actually to

John Keiger

France is revolting against Macron’s second lockdown

Second lockdowns are increasingly difficult for democratic governments to impose and maintain. Violent anti-lockdown demonstrations in Spain and Italy have hit the headlines recently. It was with considerable trepidation, then, that French political leaders ordered France’s second lockdown to begin at midnight last Thursday. It did not help that Macron like Boris had repeatedly said there wouldn’t be a second one. Ahead it went, to last officially until 1 December with a mid-term review around 14 November. In his TV address to the nation, president Macron foolhardily declared that lockdown would end when daily infections – running at 50,000 – were reduced to 5,000. The next morning, the head of

Dominic Green

Win or lose, Donald Trump has remade American politics

It’s not over till the senile guy talks gibberish. It might not be over for days. The election may shift to the courts, to be contested like history’s most important parking ticket. Regardless of who wins — and the true professionals of prediction, the bookmakers, now have Donald Trump odds-on — Donald Trump has already done the impossible. He has won the moral high ground. Since 2016, the Democrats and most of the media have told us that Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was an electoral and moral aberration. That Trump was not Hugh Hefner, but ‘Drumpf’ the white supremacist. That the voters, chastened by four years under the orange

Steerpike

Watch: Trump calls election a ‘fraud on the American people’

President Trump came out fighting after his Democratic challenger Joe Biden told supporters he believed he was ‘on track to win’ the US election. Giving a speech inside the White House, Donald Trump said he believed results to be a ‘fraud on the American people’ and stated ‘we will be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop’. He told supporters, ‘we were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,’ adding: ‘this is an embarrassment to our country.’ In response, Biden’s campaign manager said: ‘The president’s statement tonight about trying to shut down the counting of duly cast ballots was outrageous, unprecedented, and incorrect. It was

Mark Gettleson

Trump’s Latino outreach has paid off – big time

While many swing states still hang in the balance, it’s Florida that has shifted decisively to Donald Trump. As I hinted on Monday, it was Trump’s surge among the Latino vote in Miami that delivered him the state. The margins are quite astonishing – while Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county, saw a Clinton win of 30 points in 2016, Biden has clung on by just 7 points. In heavily Cuban precincts, the President snagged over 80 per cent of the vote, up from around 55 per cent last time. Indeed, despite Trump’s big win in the Sunshine State (and three points is big for Florida), non-Latino voters actually swung

Daniel DePetris

America gets the divided election result it deserves

The 2020 US presidential race was an ugly, ferocious dogfight. So it only makes sense for the contest to end the same way it started. Americans went to bed unsure who their next president was going to be. At the time of writing, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are neck-and-neck (223-212 in favour of Biden in the Electoral College tally) in most of the battleground states that will determine who emerges victorious and who will be forced into an early retirement. Trump did what he needed to do in Florida, winning by approximately three points in the perennial swing-state to keep his re-election prospects alive. It appears Trump will also

Tuesday

3 Nov 2020

Mark Gettleson

Ten states to watch on election night

Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory stunned the world. It also uprooted the electoral map: Trump won narrow victories in states which had voted Democratic for decades. This year, many forecasters have been keen to stress the unpredictability of an election that may well redefine that map again. Holding an election in a pandemic makes predictions tough: while most Republican voters are still happy to vote in person, most Democrats have cast absentee or early ballots – which may be counted at different times or rejected at different rates. It’s also unpredictable because the Trump era has shattered many usual voting habits, with many blue-collar working-class communities now solidly Republican –

Kate Andrews

The good and bad news for Trump about the US economy

With voting day finally here, what can the state of the US economy tell us about tonight’s result? While the United States has been hit hard by Covid-19, the country’s economy is showing signs of improvement – and the latest stats could be good news for Donald Trump in his bid to defy the odds and win re-election. GDP figures for the third quarter of 2020 (published last week) show a spectacular rebound for annualised GDP: 33.1 per cent between July and September. This amounts to a 7.4 per cent increase from the previous quarter, the fastest growth the US has seen in its post-war history. According to Capital Economics, the recovery can be

Patrick O’Flynn

Macron has exposed the cowardice of Boris’s response to terror

Sometimes what a politician leaves unsaid tells us more than what he does say. Take the different reactions to the wave of Islamist terror attacks across Europe by Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron. The Prime Minister’s statement of sympathy with Austria over the atrocities in Vienna last night may seem at first glance to cover the bases: ‘I am deeply shocked by the terrible attacks in Vienna tonight. The UK’s thoughts are with the people of Austria — we stand united with you against terror.’ But compare it to that from the president of France: ‘Europe is in mourning. One of our own has been hit hard by Islamist terrorism. We think of