I’d like to write that it’s now clear that sanity has prevailed, dignity will be restored to the Oval Office, and Donald Trump will have even more time for golf and less time to damage democracy.
Not so fast. This election has turned out to be closer than most good polling and pundits predicted.
Regardless of the outcome, this is some kind of vindication for the concept of the “shy Trump voter”. Fashioned on some vague notion of “shy Tories” in the UK, the idea is that people who fear social disapproval by admitting they are willing to vote for Trump end up skewing polls with no obvious way for pollsters to correct the phenomenon.
There is — as people like analyst Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight have said repeatedly and with compelling evidence — zero evidence for the shy Trump-voter effect. But that’s a technical discussion about the value of polling in general that we’ll have plenty of time for over the coming months and years.
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But let’s just note that people who attend openly racist political rallies probably don’t have a huge problem admitting to pollsters that they support a candidate with racist policies.
The best guess at the time I write is that Biden will win the presidency, but only just. And Democrats will likely not regain control of the Senate. The political and economic implications of this outcome would be significant.
But that outcome alone will be good for the United States economy in the medium run.
It would reduce the risk of trade wars with China or shooting wars with North Korea, both of which are bad for the economy (among other things). In addition, president Biden would do what he can to help transition the US economy to a greener one, without going all Green New Deal, and he would try to complete the Obamacare plan and make universal healthcare a right, not a privilege.
Even without control of the Senate he might be able to pull those things off. And perhaps he can even reverse the worst excesses of the fiscally irresponsible Trump tax cuts, though that might be the hardest lift.
If Trump wins, then the converse of all those things will be true. A second-term President Trump will presumably feel empowered to pursue an even more radical agenda. Since I can barely stomach the thought of that, and given that a Trump presidency entails so much uncertainty, let’s set that aside for now.
Imagine, if you will, a narrowish Biden win.
That will lead to some of the things mentioned above, but it will also cause a reckoning in the Democratic Party. Some will say that it vindicates the notion that only a centrist Democrat could beat a populist Republican. Biden was the perfectly imperfect encapsulation of that candidate.
An alternative narrative — one that would be favoured by left-wing Democrats — is that Biden, having come dangerously close to losing, and having failed to help retake the Senate, is a badly-damaged president-elect.
How much traction it gets will depend on the success of a Biden presidency. Should Biden manage to cut deals in the Senate, and bring back not only dignity to the presidency but economic and public-health security to the United States, then perhaps a relatively centrist candidate like Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg has a shot to be the next Democratic nominee in four or eight years.
But if Biden ekes out a win and has difficulty governing, then Democrats might well want to nominate a radical democratic socialist the next time they get a chance. Come on down Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Regardless of the particular identity of that nominee, it would involve someone who advocates a wealth tax so large — greater than what economists call the “equity premium” — that it would risk destroying capital accumulation, and maybe capitalism, in the United States.
So, ironically, the fate of the republic might depend as much on how a President Biden might govern than whether President Trump is re-elected.
The latter would be a calamity. But a “Biden fail” in government would likely lead to a dangerous and decisive leftward shift in the Democratic party that would render them either unelectable, or so damaging to the US economy that they become unelectable after a brief, dangerous, experiment with democratic socialism.
All people of good will and good sense have to hope for two Biden wins. One in the electoral college, and one in government.
What would a Biden presidency do for the world? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
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On the other had, Americans may grow to like socialism.
A president who can move capitalism from the hyper destructive state it’s in in the US to a more balanced “socialist” format like in Australia or ideally the Scandinavian countries couldn’t be that bad surely?
What utter nonsense. Democratic Socialism has not destroyed economies anywhere. We live in a society, in communities, not in an ‘economy’. And contrary to conventional economic babble, economics is a matter of choices. Yet conventional economics, like Mr Holden has done here, presents economics as a collection of mechanical certainties. And that is a major reason why we are killing the atmosphere and the environment generally.
Having said that, I have given up on any notion that the US is rational or in any way benign. When 70 million people can vote for such an evil demagogue as Trump, the US has no prospects of improvement. It is now, and has been for decades, Rome in decay.
In the US as here neither party will give the majority what they really want. Leaving us aside for the moment, in the US even a human right like Medicare for all is viewed as ‘communist’, what’s that about? Neither there or here is real climate change action even contemplated. There’s little doubt that if the democrats had had the guts to be more progressive they would have romped it in, same here with Labor.
If Biden gets up, all that has happened is that Trump crisis will be over. But the violent division and social and wealth inequity will not subside just because Trump gets sacked.
If dems had taken the senate he would’ve got his healthcare reforms through and alot of Americans would come to understand that perhaps a bit of tax funded healthcare isnt so bad.
Perhaps that would be enough to change long term under appreciation of taxes and poor expectations of government behavior would allow some balancing of wealth without all the hyperventilation.
Perhaps at the midterms.
There are not as many shy Trump supporters as people believe but I suspect there are a hell of alot of Trump trolls telling pollsters they were voting for Biden.
Disclosure that this writer is an economist would have saved valuable time wasted reading this tripe – eg “..risk destroying capital accumulation, and maybe capitalism, in the United States“.
As if this were NOT something devoutly to be wished by normal folk, beyond that dismalist creed – not a discipline, much less a science.
As for “..dangerous, experiment with democratic socialism.” it is a continuing insult to intelligence that they are even fed.
“In addition, president Biden would do what he can to help transition the US economy to a greener one, without going all Green New Deal.”
A knowledge of economic history would have to include, surely, an understanding that FDRs new deal pulled the US out of an economic abyss, and set it up for decades of economic growth. A green new deal would, or at least could, do the same and leave a legacy of ongoing renewable energy that has a production cost approaching zero. It’s a strange statement for an economics professor to make.