Orville Taylor | Donald Trumped as Joe was Biden his time

For four days, we waited. The Count from Sesame Street would have had a field day. Finally, by the beginning of the weekend, we saw what looked like a slim victory as close as the ages of the two protagonists.

What an election, and no jokes about old men and ‘election dysfunction’ because both men garnered record votes. Democratic candidate Joe Biden, with 70 million votes, set the record for the most by any presidential candidate in the history of the United States. Donald Trump garnered some 68 million votes. Around 160 million people came out to vote, a 67 per cent turnout.

This election meant a lot to everybody.

Results will not be official for another few days, and it might even be weeks until all the questions and legal challenges are resolved. I will leave it to the other pundits and critics to make whatever they wish of the shenanigans of the ‘Trumpites’ with their legal action to prevent counting, the threat to consider the election invalid, allegations of voter fraud, or the nonsense about the late votes coming in being padded. There are enough straws for those drowning under the light-blue wave to clutch at.

Yet, Biden will ultimately be the next president of the United States. Each day, he slowly clawed his way back, like Arthur Wint in the 400 metres in the 1948 Olympics, while President Trump had ‘butt cheek lock’ like Herb McKenley, who just could not hold the course, like a true ‘stulla’.

Leading up to the elections, the national opinion polls in the US had Biden leading Trump by an average margin of 50 to 40 per cent. For good measure, in 2012, the numbers were 48 to 46 per cent in favour of Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney. True, Hillary Clinton was leading Trump 47 to 42 per cent in October 2016, and she did win the popular vote by more than three million. However, it is Electoral College votes that matter.

NUMBERS LOOK THE SAME

This time, it appears that Biden won both the popular vote and the required number of college votes, having surged to unofficially win Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania on Friday while holding on for dear life in Arizona. However, despite what looks like a very slight swing in the Senate and just about holding its turf in the House of Representatives, the numbers on unofficial count do not look much different from they were on Monday.

America is still very much Trump country, and the quicker Americans recognise that, the better it will be for all.

The task facing the president is an awesome one. Not least of all is the challenge of ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Among black male voters, Trump actually got a boost. In 2008, Obama had 95 per cent of black males and 96 per cent of females. In 2012, the women remained with him, but the strength of the black male votes declined for him as he slipped to 87 per cent. As we reached 2016, Clinton had only lost two percentage points among black women, but the men were down to 82 per cent.

Black men are not overly in love with Biden. His support is down to 80 per cent among men, and women have also gone down, with just 91 per cent. A niggling question in my mind is whether the reduction in support reflects the stereotype of black women ‘hating’ on powerful black women, represented by Kamala Harris.

Trump has a message that black men seem to like, and maybe we can grope in the dark to catch cats in search of the answer. In the Midwest, more than 30 per cent of black men are Trumpites. Despite being around 13 per cent of the American population, black men disproportionately like Trump. Even with higher education, 20 per cent of males with graduate degrees support him, a figure slightly lower than the 26 per cent of high-school graduates.

In exit polls last week, compared to 2016, where he enjoyed 11 per cent of the ‘coloured folks’, the support was 26 per cent. Interestingly, the last Republican who got such backing was Richard ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon, who in 1960 gained 32 per cent of the non-white vote in a losing cause to John F. Kennedy. Interestingly, Nixon, eventually, was embroiled in an all-out war on the free press and faced impeachment before he was forced out of office just over a decade later.

There is no ‘normal’ here. Trump has also doubled his support among the LGBTQ+ community despite his endorsement from evangelicals and other ‘Christians’.

America is as divided as it has been, but the lines in the middle are blurred. The first task is unity.

- Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.