Mark Gettleson

Today the Trump administration ends. The first time a President has failed to win re-election since 1992. The first time the Republicans have spent just four years in the White House since 1892. And America’s first President to have been impeached twice. No one, as Donald himself might say, has ever seen anything like it. The incoming President and his team, meanwhile, have been remarkably lucky in the cards they now hold. While Biden won the popular vote by 7 million and 4.4 percentage points, he only scored an Electoral College victory thanks to 42,844 votes across three states (Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin), a fraction of the total cast.

Renewed moves to impeach President Trump in his final days in office, following the storming of the Capitol Building, are gathering steam in Washington. To add further to the drama of the past week, Twitter announced yesterday that it was permanently suspending the President. Nancy Pelosi went as far as calling on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to limit Trump’s access to the nuclear codes, as some had attempted with Nixon at the height of his Watergate meltdown. As for the Republican establishment – especially those in the orbit of Senate Leader Mitch McConnell – they have wanted Trump out of the picture ever since Election Day.

Senate runoffs are being held today in Georgia, due to a peculiar state law which says that if no candidate gets over 50 per cent of the vote (as neither seat did in November), the top two go on to a second round. It's the first time ever that two Senate runoffs are being held on the same day – and the first time a runoff will decide which party controls the Senate. Polls close at 7pm local time (midnight in the UK), with results coming in the following hours, though the large volume of mail-in votes, as in November, could mean a close race remains uncalled for days. Both seats seem too close to call – but it wasn't meant to be like this. Joe Biden has been the President Elect for almost two months.

In the early hours of Wednesday, with Joe Biden appearing to trail Donald Trump in the key states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, the continuity-Corbyn campaign group Momentum sent out an email on the other side of the pond declaring that ‘today, it is clearer than ever that moving to the political centre is not a winning strategy.’ It’s easy to imagine their sheer delight that a moderate, centrist Democrat – with a platform similar to that famed reactionary Barack Obama – seemed doomed to go down in flames for the second election in a row. Like almost all of the organisation’s prognostications, however, it has not aged well.

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 away from him: Duval County, home to Jacksonville, flipped to the Democrats for the first time since 1976.

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 – and Democrats making huge inroads in former conservative bastions.

As we get closer to the American election, Democrats in swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona are sounding notes of cautious optimism. Others, in Texas and Georgia, are daring to dream that Joe Biden’s national poll lead (mainly driven by suburban women) might flip those consistently red states to their column. In Florida, on the other hand, the mood is one of cautious pessimism. As it always is. Democrats are still haunted by Al Gore’s loss in 2000, when the Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida, delivering the presidency to George W Bush. In 2018, the polls showed that Democrats were on course to win Senate and Governor candidates in Florida, but they lost both, by 0.1 and 0.4 points respectively.

In the final week of her presidential campaign, with victory seemingly all but assured, Hillary Clinton visited Arizona – a state that had only once voted Democrat since 1948. The trip was later taken as an example of Clinton’s hubris, after she failed to visit Wisconsin thinking it was in the bag, only to end up losing the state by 0.77 per cent. In the end, Wisconsin proved to be the ‘tipping point state’ which took Donald Trump past the 270 electoral votes needed to take the White House.

Few things get transatlantic political geeks revved up like the Iowa caucuses. If, as Clinton strategist Paul Begala put it, politics is ‘show business for ugly people’, then Iowa is our Eurovision – bizarre, extreme and irreverent, with a cult following among a small section of the public to the bafflement of everyone else. Even the complex electoral system and the seemingly random whims of an exceptionally politicised electorate seem comparable: a candidate is expected to champion the virtues of ethanol subsidies in this corn-rich state, for instance, with the same certainty and regularity as Cyprus giving Greece douze points. How good a predictor is Iowa? The caucuses don’t actually have a great record of predicting the eventual nominee.