And here comes my forecast (USA Elections III)

 Having devoted my previous post to explain my patient readers why I think Donald J. Trump definitely deserves to lose this Tuesday, I am going to use this one to share why I think the (as of today, the very same day of the election, not that I’m taking enormous risks here!) more likely than not victory of Joe Biden doesn’t necessarily means that justice will be served, the good guys will win, the previous (mostly beneficent) state of the world will be restored and the Hegelian Spirit of History will resume its march towards greater equality/ self-consciousness/ happiness.

First, then, let’s review why said victory seems the most plausible option given what the polls say. If your are reading this blog and have the most passing acquaintance with the US political process you already know that the Washington Post’s aggregate of polls has Biden leading nationally with 10 points, the Economist’s model gives him a 95% of winning, and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives him a 90%. It surely seems like a safe bet to say that Trump is basically toast and Biden will be the next US president, doesn’t it:

Regardless of the accuracy of the model (and I think it’s the most accurate out there, although with electoral model it is as with investment funds… past performance does not guarantee future returns), the polls are almost unanimous in giving Biden a substantial lead. Even the WSJ and Fox News (who you definitely wouldn’t accuse of having a pro-democrats bias!) are giving Biden an 8-10 points lead. However, it is indeed both concerning and surprising that such lead has been shrinking in the last couple of weeks (using again 538 data, it was 10.6 a week ago and on election day it has been reduced to 8.4):

It just baffles me that Trump’s number may have gone up from low 41 to mid 42’s in a week. I can’t fathom what may have motivated a full 1.5% of the American population to decide in the last minute, seeing what we have seen during the campaign, that they were supporting the orange one all the same (or I may fathom it, just have a look at the conservative press and it all boils down to the same old same old: judges and abortion, with a sprinkling of the economy -which for those guys ends up meaning lower taxes, gargantuan deficit be damned as long as it is incurred by a Republican: from a former never Trumper: vote for Trump!/ ). Equally baffling is that Trumps favorability ratings, that have not exceeded 50% during his whole presidency (probably a historically unprecedented feat, the guy never got to be approved by more than half of the population), have infinitesimally ticked upwards in this same last week of an ugly, partisan, rancorous and generally uninspiring campaign:

Probably that simply reflects the existence of a base of die-hard followers that reject on a fundamental level everything that comes from the mainstream media and, although generally dismissive of the president until now (maybe they saw how through all his talk of being a defender of conservative values he was in it only for himself), they have reacted against the deluge of last minute almost unanimous messages against him by finding him more endearing (the “enemy of my enemy” dynamic).

Can we then conclude that Trump is definitely toast, disconnect from all the network-induced drama of the ballot recount (that may take days, more on that in a moment) and come back in a week -or even better, in a month- to see how the transfer of power is taking shape to the new Biden administration? Well, not so fast. You probably also remember how polls and models were similarly bullish on Clinton four years ago, and yet… and surely already know that this time is different (isn’t it always and every time?), Biden’s lead has hold steadily since the beginning of the campaign (but that was four years ago, when Bien was not yet the candidate, or was he already?), is at this point much bigger than Clinton’s ever was, and thus it would require a much bigger error in the polls for Trump to play a similar upset this time. Let’s just remember how the 538 model looked like back then:

So yup, looked a bit more swingy back then, steadier this time, and a bigger lead (plus probably some adjustments and improvements in how pollsters adjust more realistically to the underlying composition of the electorate, weighing by education) means that the safest bet by far is that Biden wins the popular vote (few doubts about that one, really) AND the electoral college this time around. I very much agreed (a month ago) with Scott Sumner’s opinion that if Biden arrived to election day with an advantage above 5% in FiveThirtyEight’s poll aggregator, that should be enough to overcome the electoral college bias, plus the likely poll bias that may fail again to identify hypothetical “shy” Trump voters (Money Illusion election forecast ), and Biden has indeed arrived with 8.4% advantage, so I have little doubts. There has been no October surprise, there are almost no undecided voter this time that can unexpectedly break for one candidate or the other, more than 2/3 of the electorate have already cast their ballots, so I think it’s the ignominious end of the ignominious Trump era.

That is really the “easy” part of the forecast (anybody can just visit FiveThirtyEight and reach the same conclusion). The interesting part comes afterwards, knowing that even if Biden wins big, Trump may (and almost certainly will) contest the result to the bitter end (and, after Florida in 2000 and the amount of lawyers hired to litigate this until the second coming, nobody can tell where that bitter end lies). The fact that an inordinate amount of votes have been sent by mail this time, and that the myriad of electoral systems independently managed seem to be poorly prepared to deal with such deluge, plus the fact that it may very well happen that the composition of the electorate that choose to cast their vote by mail is not exactly the same as the one choosing to vote in person (with more democrats preferring the first option, and more republicans opting for the second), it is not far-fetched, doesn’t matter how much pundits and commentators have warned against such possibility, that we have a preliminary recount tilting more heavily towards Republicans than the end result, and that in certain, Republican controlled jurisdictions, there is some movement to cut short the completion of the vote counting. A number of journalists have already fleshed out such scenario (the most famous one is penned by Barton Gellman in The Atlantic: What if Trump refuses to concede? ) but I don’t think things will get that hairy. Still, the most likely scenario is a big enough victory for Biden (one that will be recognized, albeit grudgingly, by the likes of Fox News), contested all the same by Trump, with a bunch of suits trying to delegitimize the results in a bunch of swing states, suits that will slowly and haltingly be dismissed in the end (after many months) in different instances until nobody really pays much attention to them, but enough to have Trump claiming for the rest of his life that the election was stolen, that the future democratic administration is illegitimate, and, even worse, to have a fringe (but vociferous enough to have an oversized impact in subsequent public discourse) of the Internet, the conservative media and their dark corners of social network claim to the end of days that the “Deep State”, the “Cathedral”, the “Swamp” conned once again a gullible electorate (which will be colorfully described as a “coup”, a “conspiracy” and, of course, ultimately “treason” to the constitution and the sacrosanct founding principles of the commonweal), and restored in power a dark cabal of crypto-communists hellbent on destroying the republic in spite of the lack of “true” popular support for their extremist policies. The real impact of such holdovers and shrill sycophants in the future unfolding of events is likely to be minimal, so we don't really have to pay much attention to them.

Which is essentially recognizing that "haters gonna hate" and  all that. The really important, underlying trend we have to pay attention to is the fact that the American republic long ago passed the point of no return regarding its viability (an interesting historical question would be when exactly was that point crossed: when they chose a black president and one of its major parties decided that thwarting him was more important than presenting a viable government alternative? when its liberal elites decided virtue signaling was more important than giving equal opportunities to the less educated parts of the population, even if they didn’t share their multicultural, intersectional sensibilities?). Lincoln famously declared “a house divided cannot stand” and Americans have shown the world they are a house not just divided, but irreparably, acrimoniously, vitriolically so. Each half of the country would be happier losing an eye if the other half lost both than keeping their eyes altogether, a sure sign of decadence. Sadly, most Americans still consider themselves exceptional, a “city on a hill”, an “indispensable nation”, and naively think that the rest of the world counts on them to act as the Sheriff in any international dispute gone awry and the final arbiter of truth, justice, fairness, goodness and progress, while said rest of the world has been watching in horror at the clown show that have been the last four years, crowned by the most incompetent response to this troubled time’s sanitary emergency. I live in Spain, a country that probably deserves the title of world champion in decadence (one that took place in a shorter interval than the similarly storied one of the Roman empire, happening between the beginning of the XVIth century, when Spain dominated one of the vastest empires history has known, an empire on which “the sun never set”, and the end of the XVIIth, when it became the laughingstock of Europe, whose leading nations shamelessly fought  about who to sit in its throne, without caring much for what the nationals of the sad place may opine). Such stupendous fall from the heights of inernational influence to being a backwater has helped us develop a fine instinct for identifying it in others. So we can assert with some historical perspective that the USA is already in full decadence mode (as already identified by some of its leading intellectuals: The Decadent Society ) and that, regardless of who wins this election (or the next ten ones), decadence is a one way street. One you enter that path, it’s weakening, loss of prestige, loss of international influence, loss of confidence and internal mistrust and division all the way down to run-of-the-mill country. And, worst of all, all those undesirable events will exacerbate internal strife, as they will be blamed by each half of the population on the other half (with the eventual, and mostly imaginary, help of some external evildoers, the appeal to non-existent external threats being another surefire sign that a country is on a downward trajectory).

So, considered with a wide enough perspective, it really, doesn’t matter who is finally awarded today’s election, how long and chaotic is the process to reach such decision, and finally who governs for the next four years (likely torturous and conflictive ones). America, and by extension the West, and our current dominant reason, are all doomed because of underlying forces that run deeper, and are much stronger, than what any single individual can control. For those unduly excited by the perspective of a Biden restoration, and a return to normal, and the belief in the arch of history bending towards justice, we should remember that after Nero, an emperor that most historians consider extremely bad who governed from 54 to 68 AC, the empire still knew its years of maximum territorial expansion under Trajan (98 – 117 AD) and Hadrian (117 – 138 AD). The question, then, is if Trump will be like Nero, a minor blip in a still ascendant trajectory, or rather more like an  Elagabalus (218 – 22 AD), after whom it was really all decadence and degeneration until the final collapse, with very little in the form of respite or recovery of past glories. Not needing to go to such lengths of historical comparison, I found this article by Branko Milanovic to provide some balanced and equipoised perspective: What are the stakes (less than you think!)

To be able to answer that question, we have to remove the veil that for decades has obscured the view of what America’s two main parties (considered as political organizations, something they are appreciably no more) have been defending, and whose interests have shaped their programs and their achievements when in power. But such removal will have to wait until my next post on the issue.